


Waxing Gibbous

by Asset011



Category: Prospect (2018)
Genre: Accidental Death, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Anxiety, Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Death, Dirty Talk, Exhibitionism, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Gore, Graphic Depictions of Illness, Mutual Masturbation, Near Death Experiences, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, References to Depression, Surgery, Threesome - F/F/M, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-10
Updated: 2020-11-10
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:27:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 31,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27481945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Asset011/pseuds/Asset011
Comments: 6
Kudos: 8





	1. Part One

_Waxing Gibbous_

_Pairing: Ezra + femNurse! Reader_

_Rating: Hard M / 18+ ONLY_

_Warnings: Angst/violence/gore/blood/mentions of prostitution/SMUT(eventual)/veryinaccuratesurgicalprocedure_

  * Summary: You are a nurse on the Green moon contracted to care for a group of prospectors. An act of violence forces you to flee your camp. Ezra finds you.


  * Words: 2376



  
  


The first time Ezra fell, it was with the Saters. You’d been hunched in a cordoned-off section of tent, dust motes waxing and waning against the haze of thick, dank air. At least you could breathe, a small mercy it was to remove your helmets and sit unfettered in the musty inner folds of the makeshift barracks.

The Sater stank. When he sneered at you, his grey lips parted to reveal the jagged tombstones of his teeth. When you had first sat down and dispelled with the perfunctory greetings, choking down the offering of what always reminded you of unsweetened Turkish coffee mixed with engine oil, his eyes made no attempt to hide the way they had raked over you as if you were some shiny toy. Or a bag of meat. You were under no delusions when it came to the fact that you, by nature of being female, were going to be ogled. Still, it left you no less disgusted as you fought to keep your face impassive while his eyes honed in on your chest.

Ezra sat beside you on the narrow bench, hunched forward with forearms balanced on knees that were spread to allow for his head to clear the sunken canvas ceiling. His expression was equally neutral, the only hint of tension showing in the tight bunch of muscle at his jaw. He knew as well as you that if the sater did not accept the barter, things would turn dark.

Ezra had been here longer than you. Stranded with no transport after the crew he’d arrived with turned on each other over dig locations and payload disbursement. The pod they’d arrived in had been burned, irreparably damaged and left no more than a husk in the Green due to the short-sighted fury and bullheaded ire of his hired compatriots. In the fracas, he’d sustained an injury to his right arm from a rogue thrower shot. In retrospect it could have been much worse, but the spores of mold that made the air so toxic had worked its way into his flesh the same way selfishness and suspicion had seeded the demise of his partners.

You were hired as a nurse to tend to your own hired prospecting crew, lured in with promises of adventure and treasures beyond your wildest dreams. You had known there had to be a catch, you were not so naive to believe that consequence could elude you, but you had signed the contract anyway hoping for more than the dreary clinic you’d worked in for the past five years. You were alone, you were lonely, you had no family. Your few friends had steadily drifted away from you as they met their own partners, started their own families. You were left to the ether. So you signed almost without thought when the recruiter came, signed before you had time to think it through, because you were aware that if you thought too much you’d talk yourself out of it. You knew all too well how adept you were at talking yourself out of things.

So, you’d arrived on the Green and things had proceeded as planned, uneventful for the most part. The others on the crew were respectful, if a bit distant. Nothing untoward had happened until a contractor by the name of Jorin began to take a particular interest in you. At first you’d been able to politely deflect his advances. Showing up in your tent unannounced, he feigned all manner of illness and injury to get your attention. Over time he became more aggressive, invading your space until you had told him, in no uncertain terms, that he was not welcome. It was not until he’d followed you back to your cot and tried to push you down that you’d snapped. You hadn’t meant to kill him, but the scalpel you had hidden in your fist had found its way to his carotid artery nonetheless. So you left, and you were blank and in shock and covered in someone else’s blood when Ezra found you.

He’d stood, imposing and straight-backed, hand on hip while his head followed your shambling approach. Your adrenaline was waning, and you shuffled forth on trembling legs, hands held aloft in supplication. When you reached his clearing in the midst of dense vegetation you noted his mouth moving at light-speed, the hand on his hip twitching toward the thrower he had slung across his back. As you got even closer you noticed his eyes were wide. You were not on the same transmission channel so you could not hear him. Your hands gestured as if underwater, left hand tapping your transceiver while your right held up three trembling fingers. When Ezra understood he switched the channel and immediately his animated drawl was filling your helmet.

“.....cannot _fathom_ how you are standing in my sights looking like you’ve been baptised by Lady Bathory herself, alone? Please do tell this lonely old prospector how in Kevva’s _name_ _above_ you’ve found yourself in such a state of affairs?”

You noticed immediately that he did not seem at all frightened or wary of your appearance, just confused, and….excited? You gazed up into the visor through a constellation of blood spatter and freed your tongue from its bone-dry cavern, swallowing thickly.

“I didn’t mean to kill him. He tried to, to…..he came after me.”

Ezra stepped forward in what seemed a conspiratory move. You froze. Taking note, he’d immediately stepped back, but his dark eyes fastened to yours with an intensity that made you feel as though he could see through you into your very essence, every shameful childhood memory, every flaw and triumph as readable as prose on paper.

“Intention rarely informs the realities of snuffing out the flame of mortality. Between intention and action there lay an endless array of variables, something I know as well as my own name. In all my time on the Green the one thing that continues to ring true is that people here take. If you have nothing to offer, they will find something to take.” 

He straightened before continuing, “Given that you are appreciably female I can imagine what it is he believed himself entitled to. You have none of that to fear from me, little stranger. I am but one lost soul amongst this verdant hellscape.”

You were still processing the events of the past several hours, and it took you some time to accustom your ears to the man’s mellifluous cadence. The people in your previous company had been stilted, blunt, mostly monosyllabic. This man before you spoke as if convinced his words would alight and manifest whatever sacred force or unimagined color the universe deemed fit to spew forth. It was incongruous. You considered your next words carefully before you spoke.

“Do you have a dwelling? A tent? I hate to impose, but this is my only suit and I’d like to get as much blood out of it as I can.”

That was how you’d become acquainted with Ezra. You’d exchanged names as you walked to his tent, and all the while Ezra pontificated. The tent was modest, two cots arranged across from one another. Equipment stacked along one canvas wall, while texts and notebooks spread across a folding table toward the front entrance. Ezra explained where the water source was located as you both disconnected your helmets and stripped your suits. The blood splashed across yours had dried to a dull rust. Almost as if it could be something other than blood. Almost. 

You’d set the suit to soak in cold water and truly noticed the man in front of you for the first time. He was tall and broad-shouldered, thick locks jutting chaotically from the dome of his head and curling around the lobes of his ears. A shock of blond colored the seam of his hairline. His brow was lined with years of tension and unrest. Wide, dark eyes below pronounced brows. A prominent aquiline nose. His mouth, still moving. Always moving, as if he were trying to get every thought he had out of his head before the hourglass ran out on him.

Your eyes were next drawn to a dirty bandage circling his arm. You’d been so lost in your head over the strange turn of events that you did not notice the barely perceptible wince as he inventoried what appeared to be dried ration packets.

“What happened? To your arm, I mean?”

Ezra sighed deeply before answering. “Merely a flesh wound from an errant thrower blast while my crew and I were in the midst of parting ways. It was a most unsavory affair, I’m afraid. I don’t believe the weasel wielding the staff even meant to shoot me.”

You stepped closer, eyeing the torn, worried cloth. “You have to be careful. The spores in the air will seep into everything, especially an open wound. Your bandage is filthy. Do you mind if I take a look?”

“You have experience with dressing wounds?”

“I’m a nurse.”

You were wholly unprepared for the brilliant smile that split his face. Suddenly you could see the younger, roguish man that he had undoubtedly once been. You were suddenly overwhelmed, you could not understand how the heart in your chest fluttered as desperately as a bird beating its wings against the cage of your ribs. You felt close to panic as you realized that you were reacting this way to a man you did not know. 

_Careful._

“Kevva above, I must have done something right in a past life as I’ve done nothing in this one to deserve such a fortuitous gift! A nurse! An angel of mercy, a dove of benevolence!”

You felt heat rush to your face, and you cursed your feeble emotions as you turned quickly away from him. _Please, ignore my abject idiocy._

“Med kit?”

“Ah, of course. My apologies, Dove, I forget myself.”

You pointedly ignored the unprompted endearment as any further contemplation on this new development would lead to literal hysteria. _What the fuck is wrong with me?_

Ezra sat at the table near the entrance, sweeping the array of notebooks and papers to the side. You pulled up a crate once taking the med kit and unwrapped the soiled bandaging. You understood how awkward it had to be to dress a wound with one hand, and so you were able to forgive the haphazard application. He hissed and winced again as you revealed a very red, open and _angry_ wound bed assaulting the meat of his right bicep. Black had begun to settle in around the ragged edges. It did not look good. Your gut sank as you noticed the purplish pucker of skin surrounding a crater that oozed and tunneled, purulent drainage saturating the underlying gauze. 

The mold had done a spectacular job of decaying what would have normally been a straight forward traumatic thrower wound. You were shocked that Ezra was not screaming in pain.

You kept your face studiously blank as you set out supplies: a vial of Ancef, sterile saline, bandaging, gauze, antimicrobial foam, hydrogen peroxide, a basin, and the scalpel you’d kept clutched in your fist as you’d fled. There was an injectable narcotic preloaded, you offered this to Ezra and he shook his head, his eyes still and worried. He knew it was bad, and he was scared. A wave of melancholy slammed into you and without thinking, you reached out and laid your fingers gently on his wrist.

“Hey.” He met your eyes, and they were old. Ancient, and filled with what was akin to an existential weariness. You had to dig the toe of your boot into your calf to keep your eyes from filling with tears. You cleared your throat. It did not sound like a noise you’d make. You wondered who you were, really, before speaking.

“I’m going to do the best that I can. It won’t be pretty. Your wound is badly infected. The black bits are necrotic, and if I don’t debride your wound it will spread. I’m going to try my hardest to save your arm. This is going to hurt, so I really think you should take the injection.”

Ezra’s solemn gaze swung to fasten on yours. After a pause of internal debate, he simply nodded. You filled the basin with hydrogen peroxide and placed the scalpel in. You picked up the preloaded syringe and sterile gauze and quickly discharged the narcotic serum into Ezra’s left deltoid. His eyes soon took on a haze of detachment, pupils constricting to pinpoints.

You picked up the scalpel and got to work, and Ezra finally screamed.

He kept his arm impressively still while sweat cut rivulets down the planes of his face. His jaw clenched so tightly you feared his teeth would crack and splinter- you’d finally and wordlessly paused your work to place a length of spare leather strapping between his teeth, which he clamped onto like a feral dog.

You worked quickly and wordlessly, cutting ribbons of spoiled flesh from the blessedly granulating bed of tissue and muscle beneath. Your mind worked in circular prayer, asking forgiveness from the universe for killing, for hurting. Ezra’s flesh was a sacred scroll and you were inscribing your texts upon it, begging for deliverance. It was not lost on you that the same scalpel you’d used to snuff one life was carving death out of another.

When the deed was done, you reconstituted the Ancef and injected it into the meat of his buttock. You did it quickly, too wrung out and disturbed to feel impure. There was nothing prurient about what had just happened, nothing sexy in his agony. For all of its intimacy it was brutal and ugly and traumatic. At that moment you were inextricably bound to one another.

  
  



	2. Part Two

Waxing Gibbous   
Pairing: Ezra + femNurse! Reader  
Rating: Hard M / 18+ ONLY

* Warnings: Assault/non consensual touching/ allusions to prostitution/ violence/ sexual tension  
* Summary: Ezra is healing. You need something from a Sater. How far are you willing to go to get it?

Part Two  
Healing was slow, but you persisted. Your two hands were much better equipped to both clean the wound and change his bandaging. It became something of a ritual between the both of you.   
While he recovered from your carving and salving Ezra could not harvest. Instead, he began to teach you. Your steady hands translated well to the realm of aurelac and you proved a quick study. Each evening after tending to his arm, Ezra sat with you, talking you through the painstaking process of revealing the rare gem within the insidious flesh of the grey myotic sac. In between instruction and gentle correction he continuously spouted all manner of anecdotal adventures. From the sounds of the auditory tapestries he wove, he had either lived the lives of twenty men, or he was an unparalleled story teller. You suspected both were true.  
He also expressed his gratitude to you profusely and often, almost always peppered with his chosen moniker for you. Dove. You never commented on it, rather you craned your head downward with a small smile at the endearment. You couldn’t help it- you were not used to being flattered.   
“I truly would have perished within the confines of this wretched tent with either blood-borne infection or lack of primary limb, Dove. I truly do not deserve the gift of your presence.”  
Dip, smile. And oh, Ezra noticed. Part of you felt certain this must be a game to him, seeing how many times he could cause this reaction.  
“You need to consider changing your repertoire, Ez. You’re beginning to sound like a looping transmission.”  
Flashing a look of mock consternation, he sighed dramatically and sagged his shoulders. “I cannot find it in me to change a tune I find so true, fateful wordpresser that I am.”  
You snorted.   
“More like a belt sander.”  
Ezra’s guffaw startled you, a rich, deep laugh that erupted from the depths of his belly and left his frame shaking. Head thrown back, a rare glimpse into who he must be when he is somewhere safer, somewhere that is not here on this moon, in this tent. He was achingly beautiful in his unexpected abandon. You found yourself wanting to know him like this.  
“However did I exist here without you to keep me humble, Dovie?”

There were enough ration packs to last at least three stands, there were also at least three unopened cases of the chalk-dry, artificially flavored nutribars that Ezra swore contained more sawdust than actual nutrients. There was a filtration system that served to contain and purify the water they used for both bathing and drinking.  
What there was not enough of were antibiotics.   
You fretted silently over the state of his arm. Though infection did not seem to be returning, you knew full resolution was precarious. The spores were persistent, they sought things to weaken and degrade. Neither lungs nor torn flesh was immune. And though the tear-shaped gouge in Ezra’s arm was closing and filling, you worried. Your stores of supplies were steadily dwindling, and you knew you would need more of everything.   
You had finally sat down on the cot you’d claimed, across from Ezra’s own, and made clear your concerns.   
Which brought you back to the Sater in the tent who stared like a starving waif while you fixed your gaze on a room toward the back, an opening into a dark, fetid maw.  
You were here for supplies. You had known this time would come as certainly as you knew the Sater sitting before you was dreaming of how well you could be bred.  
Your prior dealing with them had been few and suspicious. Swayed by their own adopted codes you knew that weapons were forbidden, so you had tucked Ezra's thrower and blaster in the shrubbery behind the dwelling’s easternmost support pole. You played the game, conferring with blunt hand signals before being granted access to this musty tomb. You played your hand, bringing with you some of the water and nutribars you both had to spare. You made your offer and waited in tense silence before the Sater finally coughed, spitting a wad of grey phlegm toward the dirt between Ezra’s legs.  
“I’ll give you what you ask for after I have a turn with your girl.”  
You shut your eyes and dropped your head with a heavy sigh. So predictable. Had you really thought, for even a moment, that it wouldn’t come down to this?  
You glanced at Ezra, who remained expressionless. The muscle in his jaw began to twitch. After a sustained beat of tension-filled silence, he spoke. His voice was both even and pitched a grade higher than he may have intended, you thought.  
“My companion is her own autonomous being, and more than capable of speaking on her own behalf. She belongs to no one, save herself.”  
The Sater grunted in response and swung his blood-shot gaze to you. You appeared to consider for a moment, tilting your head in consideration, before speaking.  
“You do not get to kiss me and you do not get to cum inside of me.”  
There followed a beat of silence, followed by the low chuckle from the Sater, who you’re sure can barely believe his luck. Ezra….was not expecting that. His impassive expression had evaporated. His eyes trained on your face, wide and panicked. They screamed at you in silence. Another beat.  
“Little Dove,” he murmured. His voice was tremulous.   
He turned to the Sater. “A moment alone if you will, I implore you. It will take no more than a tick.”  
The Sater snorted and shrugged, stumbling to his feet. “Meet me in my quarters when you’re done warming her up.”  
You suddenly thought of what had been nagging at the back of your mind since the negotiations had begun. Turning to the retreating man you spoke out once again with a fresh edge of panic.  
“Wait! Before you go I’m amending our agreement. We’ll need the med kit first or it’s a no go.”   
The Sater paused in his stumbling retreat, turned back toward you with a sneer twisting his features. “How do I know you won’t just kill me when you get your blasted kit?”  
At a loss, you shrugged. “I’m trustworthy. I’m a nurse. My word is good,” you finished lamely.  
At that, he bent over and reached for a case under his rotting bench. Unceremoniously kicked it across the floor to rest beside Ezra’s boot.  
“Get on with it then, so you can nurse my cock.”   
Once alone, you turned furtively to Ezra, who was looking more and more like he was a hair’s breadth from complete panic.  
“Ezra. Breathe.”  
Air expelled itself forcefully from his pursed lips. He said your name.  
“You do not have to do this. We can find another way...I cannot deign to preserve my limb at the cost of your dignity. Not like this, please, I beg you to reconsider….”  
“Ezra, I need you to open the case, please. Make sure everything we need is in it.”  
He reached down and set it on the bench, quickly popping the rusted lid. You noticed his hands were trembling. It made your chest ache. “All here,” he whispered, mournful. So sad and lost. It almost broke you. You inhaled and willed your breath to steady your words.  
“Ezra,” you sighed. You closed the space between you, face upturned as you reached out a hand and placed it on his forearm. He stood still, his eyes desperately searching yours, beseeching. You swore they contained galaxies.  
“I need you to trust me. Can you trust me?”  
“Yes. But I don’t trust him. He could cause you harm. You have no weapon.”  
You quirked the corner of your mouth in a wry smile as you regarded him. “No, I don’t have a weapon.” Steeling yourself, you unclasped your hand from his arm and turned to the doorway.  
“You stay right here. Keep the kit in your hand and stand by the door. I won’t be long.”  
When you retreated into the back room to tend to the Sater you noted Ezra where you had left him, head hanging down, knuckles white and fists clenched against his thighs.  
The back space of the tent was, as expected, filthy. The Sater stood eagerly and approached you. No sooner had you entered his orbit than he had you spun round with your back to his chest. Without preamble his hand was pawing roughly at your breasts. Kevva, he smelled so bad you could taste him.  
It was a mercy he was so overeager. He fumbled with your clothing, ripping at the zipper. You aided him in the quick divestment, and he may have thought you just as excited in some twisted way. You were trying to keep him from ripping your suit, however, and you needed your hands free in front.  
You knew the Saters. You knew they would not allow a palaver without weapons left behind in the ruined atmosphere of the Green. The air outside was poison, your suit protected you, and it was just roomy enough to conceal the syringe you’d taped to the inside of your leg.  
His hands coasted coarsely over the curve of your buttock toward your cunt, and as he veered ever closer you detached the needle, thumbed off the cap and scissored your arm backward. Your aim was true, and a full syringe of propofol discharged into the meat of his thigh.   
The potent suspension worked quickly, the Sater’s look of shocked confusion melting to blank smoothness as he went boneless against your back. You stepped forward and he slumped to the ground.  
You exited quickly and bit down the guilt that suddenly threatened to overtake you. Ezra had been frantically running his fingers through his hair, you could tell. It corkscrewed chaotically like polar ends of a magnet. He looked beside himself with worry. When he saw you emerge his shoulders shot up and his mouth was immediately spouting queries and concerns barely separated by the atoms between your propulsions. You held up a hand.  
“We need to leave.”  
He snapped his mouth shut, for once not attempting to argue or cajole.  
You left for your own dwelling. Ezra began speaking again in earnest, but his questions were soft. Hesitant. As you trekked you explained to him exactly what had transpired, pausing every so often to let your words find their weight within him. As you approached the flaps of your own abode you noted he’d fallen silent. This worried you.  
When you had both entered and removed your helmets to breathe the canned, circulated air he asked you to sit.  
You faced one another in the usual position, each perched on the edges of your cots.  
Ezra stayed silent a moment longer, as if composing his words with measured precision.   
“I told you back there that I trusted you, and I do. Implicitly and without question.”  
You nodded, waiting for him to continue. Continue he did, but you did not miss his uncharacteristic uncertainty.  
“Do you….not trust me?”  
You were incredulous. “What? Of course I trust you! Is it because I didn’t tell you what I was going to do back in that tent? I was doing what I needed to do to save your arm. I couldn’t make him suspicious. I needed you to react naturally.”  
Ezra contemplated your words, nodding slowly. When he turned back to you, his expression had turned somehow dark, and there was a moment when something feral flashed in the intensity of his gaze.   
It made you shiver, and something thick and wild collected low in your belly. You felt an elastic tugging between the both of you, growing ever more taught and thin and tight.  
When he spoke next, he had begun to accept that he was falling.  
When he spoke next, his voice was low and firm and rough.  
“Don’t do it again.”


	3. Part Three

_ Waxing Gibbous  _

_ Pairing: Ezra + femNurse! Reader _

_ Rating: Hard M / 18+ ONLY _

_ * Warnings: Assault/violence/ mentions of masturbation/ blood/ gore/ comfort/ injury _

_ * Summary: In the field, you are found. Ezra reveals his duality. _

_ * Word Count: 1611 _

_ * I cannot begin to thank all of you enough for reading this. It means absolutely everything in the entire universe. For the first time in so very long I feel as though I’m doing something that makes me happy. I love you!!  _

PART THREE

“Shit!”

Acrid steam poured from the ruined sac before you. Unsure of how you could be so adept at harvesting while practicing in the tent, yet so clumsy in the actual field, you stood and stretched your back. It was unbearably hot today; your suit was clinging to your skin like cling film. It was stifling and you were tired.

Ezra was soon to return with replenished water bottles, you supposed, having trekked south of you to a stream you’d come across a few days prior. You estimated he’d been gone around twenty minutes.

Since the events with the Sater had transpired the tension between you had seemed to grow exponentially. You’d found yourself idling on Ezra’s face more than you cared to admit to yourself. You’d unintentionally begun cataloguing the nuances of movement contained in his hands, the reactions on his expressive face to the things you said. More often now, you took note of that dark intensity returning to flash across his features when he thought you weren’t looking. This did not scare you; rather, it left your skin feeling too tight for your body, your core aching and burning until you had no choice but to shut yourself in the refresher and furiously bring yourself off, biting at your sleeve to muffle your guttural scream when you came seizing and shaking on your fingers. Something you’d once thought shameful now left you somehow ravenous. When you’d re-entered the common space of the tent you’d done nothing to hide the flush in your face or mussed hair. You’d shot Ezra a wide smile as he’d quirked his brow, his expression otherwise unreadable. You’d exited the tent as you felt suddenly faint- is this who you were now? Ezra made you feel wild and alive, like you had finally managed to snap out of a trance. Or wake up from an unending, uninspired dream of safe decisions and mediocrity.

You mused on this in your suit on the Green, the suit still bearing faint tepid stains from your original sin. You were not paying attention, having almost certainly made up your mind to make Ezra aware of your feelings when you returned from the day’s work.

Thus, you were doubly taken aback when the stone connected with the side of your helmet. With a dull cracking noise you fell to the dust. Your head ricocheted against the interior of your dome. Your ears rang; you tasted blood. How did you get here?

A steel-toed boot connected with your ribs, forcing the air from your lungs. You gasped, you couldn’t breathe, couldn’t force air in. Pain exploded once again, exquisite in its intensity. A cracking sound- bone or helmet? You curled in on yourself, stunned, trying to process what this was that was happening to you. 

_ Get. Up. _

Part of you wanted this whole farce to be over. The Green, the tent, this unseen assailant. Just end it. If this is how it’s supposed to happen, who are you to challenge fate? You could only hope for quickness, the pain is too much, this life is too much, you are a fool, how could you even consider someone like Ezra could  _ want _ you. You are a weak, sniveling, invisible slug. You are going to die. You will rot and fester and become toxic, like the air on this cursed moon. Unknown and forgotten.

_ Get. Up. _

Another kick, this time to your kidney. This time you found your air, cried out. It was weak, pathetic. You noted the mist of blood across the window of your helmet, so similar to before, except this time it was on the inside. It was yours. It caused a switch to flip on in you, sudden panic blooming in your chest. All at once your body called back to its evolutionary directive to  _ survive _ . 

It took everything within you to move. Blinding pain behind your eyes like needles as you rolled onto your front, then onto your knees. Your stomach roiled- you swallowed bile as you craned your head upward to finally view your assailant.

It was the Sater. Of course. The dose of sedative you’d shot into his thigh had not been enough to kill him, merely incapacitate him long enough for you to escape with the precious med kit. He had recovered and now he had found you, and he was going to kill you. This so perfectly encapsulated life on the Green that you could have laughed. It was almost poetic.

You could not hear his words, but you could see his sneer. He cocked his leg back to land another blow to you as you squeezed your eyes shut and waited. The blow did not come.

Instead, you heard the sound of bodies connecting, and an unearthly snarl.

_ Ezra. _

__ You opened your eyes and Ezra was upon him, a frenzy of fists landing over and over wherever he could reach. The Sater was overcome, had no time to react. The sounds that escaped Ezra’s mouth through your connected channel were almost inhuman in their ferocity.

You watched through the pain of each shuddering breath as he yanked the air hose from the Sater’s helmet, then grasped wildly at the connecting clasps of the helmet. Finding the seal, he pried frantically, finally freeing the dome and exposing the Sater’s face to the atmosphere. His fists connected with whatever was revealed, ruining and rupturing. 

You had known that Ezra had sometimes had to be brutal in order to survive here. You knew that you had had to do the same. But seeing him like this, the unleashed rabidity of his rage unleashed on another was almost too much. As Ezra exhausted himself upon the Sater’s demolished face you found yourself having to turn away. The blows finally slowed in frequency and intensity when it became increasingly apparent that the Sater was no longer breathing.

Ezra stood and gazed down at the body of the Sater, his lip curled. He turned to you, to where you knelt in the dust, and his expression melted into a mask of pain. It was almost as if the Sater had been pummeling  _ him _ . You blinked and then he was beside you, his hands were on you, so unbelievably gentle as he swept up your stomach, moved carefully across your shoulders and down your arms. You met his gaze, mortally exhausted, and thought that perhaps you could still die here. Your ears rang and your head throbbed. Your stomach and chest ached, and you wondered from a faraway place if you could be bleeding internally.

Ezra was crying, his eyes were red and swollen. He must have been crying while he killed.

Through the beating static in your brain, you heard his voice asking if you thought you could stand. 

You had tried, but a wave of nausea and vertigo had you swooning back toward the ground almost immediately. Ezra caught you and held you close against the breast of his suit until you felt a bit steadied. His heart thrummed wildly in his chest, and it served to center you.

“We have only to trek back to the tent, sweet Dove. I will carry you if need be, but we cannot negotiate an alternative option.” Your nod was almost imperceptible, and you began a stumbling, shambling walk back to your tent. Ezra kept his arm close around your waist and draped your own limb across his shoulders. When you finally entered the interior he assisted you onto your cot. He helped to divest you of your helmet and suit before hastily removing his own, his eyes never leaving yours. Each wince of pain was answered by his own sympathetic sounds and mumbled apologies.

“I am so sorry, sweet girl. My Dove, my Star...I will spend the rest of my life and whatever is beyond making it up to you….”

You were too sore and numb to be embarrassed as he undressed you, carefully inspecting every inch of your skin before covering you back up. He carefully cleaned the dried blood from your nose and mouth, pausing briefly to cradle your face in his large, warm hands. He rested his forehead against yours before placing the ghost of a kiss at your hairline.

You knew you were concussed, and so Ezra kept you awake. Kneeling on the floor He used dulcet tones and soft inflections to keep you engaged. He told you what he knew of the ancient Greek myths and incestuous dealings between gods and men. He expounded on the constellations and how the old prospectors would time their harvests according to the position of the stars in the sky. He told you of his childhood home on Earth and growing up in a poor parish in Louisiana. He talked about his only sibling, his older brother Isaiah, who he’d worshipped and followed blindly into the realm of prospecting before drink and women left him dead in some back-planet alleyway, robbed and stabbed.

Finally you begged in mumbling tones to sleep, your eyes weighed down and feeling full of sand. Ezra acquiesced, but not before pulling his cot to join with yours. He lay on his side next to you, grasping your hand carefully as if it were glass. He moved his thumb over your skin in circles that soothed you as your eyes closed and eased you into dreamless slumber while Ezra’s deep, even breathing anchored you to his side.

  
  



	4. Part Four

_Waxing Gibbous_

_Pairing: Ezra + femNurse! Reader_

_Rating: Hard M / 18+ ONLY_

_* Warnings: comfort/ injury /SMUT (super explicit I’m not kidding I have sinned)/ This is just straight up pornography tbh_

_* Summary: uh, sex. They bang._

_* Word Count: 2631_

  
  
  


PART FOUR

  
  


Time moved unlike a straight line from one point to another, but rather like the ripples in a stream when a pebble was tossed in. The pebble was the day you were attacked. Ezra was the stream, and he flowed around you and outward and rode time like it was a beast he could tame.

You were surprised he let you use the refresher by yourself after that day. He was always hovering, a shadow ensuring you could not trip up, you could not wander and lose yourself.

Two weeks since the incident in the field, your bruises were finally faded to a sickly yellow. You were fortunate, incredibly so, to have not sustained more serious injury. Kevva had looked out for you, and now so did Ezra.

You noticed that he had become a bit quieter, more contemplative. When he spoke to you he seemed to weigh his words. He checked in with you often- were you okay, were you thirsty, were you having bad dreams? Ezra had his share of nightmares, he was unafraid to tell you in the darkness of night that there was no weakness in confessing such things. He no longer hid how he looked at you, and you often held his gaze until you could bear no more and turned away burning. You noticed that he touched you often, a hand on your shoulder or against the small of your back. You remembered the day he had absentmindedly reached out to tuck an errant strand of hair behind your ear, as if he’d done it many multitudes of times before. It had made you feel like both a cherished treasure and an exposed nerve.

Ezra’s cot stayed where it was moved that first night, sidled up with yours. You’d first held onto one another’s hands each night as part of a new ritual between soft words and sighs. You’d drifted slowly closer in cover of darkness, eventually tucked against him when you awoke in the morning. It began to be like this more often than not.

You’d refrained from trying to broach anything more physical from him for the time being as you healed from your injuries. As you slowly came back to yourself, your desire for him returned. One night, instead of latching onto his hand, you’d beckoned his arms around you and aligned your back with his chest. His breath bloomed sweetly against the back of your neck as you ran a warm palm slowly up and then down the arm around your waist. Your skin felt electric against him. Slowly he responded to your languid touches with his own, rounding his own burning palms over the curve of your hip. A sense of fullness began to build between your legs, and pressure was cresting to an aching burn as some hidden part of you roared awake. You were dimly aware of your breaths becoming heavier, more explosive.

The string snapped. Without warning Ezra ground his hips into yours and attached his hot mouth to your neck. You could not stop the moan that escaped your mouth, it surprised you in its volume. Ezra moaned in answer to you and placed his lips to the shell of your ear.

“Is this real? Is this really happening?” His voice was impossibly low, husking and landing in plosives against your ear. The feeling of the low force of his words were like an electric shock that arched straight to your cunt.

Your eyes were squeezed shut, you were convinced that at any second he might evaporate. You gasped and arched your back involuntarily when you felt the tip of his hot, wet tongue against your lobe. He hadn’t even touched you yet and you felt as if you would explode. He strained forward to meet the cleft of your ass and you felt him, impossibly hot and hard. Your voice left you strangled.

“Ha...oh...fuck _Ezra_ …pleasepleaseplease touch me. I’ll die if you don’t touch me…”

His lips still held to your ear, he murmured to you as his own breath gasped and hitched.

“Dove, you have to know that this cannot be a one-time encounter. I intend on ruining you for anyone else.” His teeth nipped at your neck, you gasped and shuddered. You were going to cum just like this, his breath and his words and his length pressed against you and he hadn’t even _touched_ you yet. 

You actually _sobbed_ when his hand finally connected with you, you had expected his fingers to go first to your breasts like the well-established patterns of foreplay the men before him ascribed to, but instead his hand had curved down the swell of your ass and had slid between your legs to cup your weeping core. You couldn’t breathe, you couldn’t speak, you keened out into the darkness and ground yourself desperately against the heel of his hand. 

He pressed against you and your cunt was volcanically hot through the thin fabric of your thermal pants.

“How are you so hot?” he whispered, as if almost to himself. “How is this divine sex so ready for me?” His voice was impossibly closer. “Answer me, angel.”

You craned your head backward to seek his mouth. His words were molten, you felt like you were flying apart.

“Ezra, please…..”

Before you could blink, Ezra was ripping your pants down your legs, barely pausing to unhook them from your ankles, tossing them violently to the side.

Getting back on the cot he rolled you onto your back before plunging his hand back between your legs. His fingers slid through your slick, and the groan that ripped itself from his mouth was _filthy_.

“ _FUCK_.” He was panting against your mouth, his lips hovering, not touching, just beyond your grasp. You inhaled as he exhaled desperately, gasping him into you the way you needed him inside you elsewhere.

“Kevva _wept_ , I have never felt a cunt like this, if this is what I am doing to you I’m as good as deified.” You gasped when he removed his hand and brought it up to your face. Your slick was coating each digit like a perverse film, webbing in strands between his fingers.

You should have shook with embarrassment, you thought, but your eyes widened in fascination as he brought his sodden fingers to your mouth and slowly painted your lips with your own arousal. You flicked your tongue out to taste yourself. 

“Oh my God,” you whined.

It was then that Ezra finally kissed you, dipping his own tongue into the cavern of your mouth before following with his feral lips. His hand shot back down between your legs and he pressed his first two fingers to either side of your aching clit.

He moved his mouth against yours with a growl as he pressed down and slid his fingers up and down aside your erect bud, the noises from your soaked core reverberating through the tent. 

Without warning your orgasm slammed into you like an intergalactic freighter, and you vaguely realized you may be screaming. Your entire body seized and shook, your back arching you off the mattress, and it was nothing like anything you’d ever experienced, you could not control the movements of your limbs and you could feel your cunt squeezing and gushing and bearing down on nothing as Ezra seemed momentarily as surprised as you were.

His eyes locked on your face, wide with wonder as he kept up a slow, steady pace.

“My sweet, beautiful girl, I’ve never seen anything as erotic as the spectre of you falling apart beneath me…” His eyes, soulful and sincere, searched yours as his fingers moved lower to your twitching hole. He slid his mouth back to the cusp of your ear and pitched his voice low and the syrup that erupted from his tongue was soaked in sin.

“Do it again.”

He slid first one, then two fingers into your grasping channel. The way he moaned when he did so, it could have been his cock instead.

“Sweet Kevva _fuck_ , I may not survive you.”

He angled his fingers and zeroed in on a textured, spongy portion of your leaking passage and pistoned his fingers in and out against it. You were immediately brought right back to the precipice as you felt another climax build within you. You were shocked, having never been brought so close so quickly before. In the past you’d had orgasms with women and men, but you were always left sated after one, if a bit overstimulated. You were wholly inexperienced when it came to the razor-sharp lust and hunger that Ezra was spiking in you.

You were making sounds you’d thought yourself incapable of. You should have been mortified. You were consumed, you could not find it within yourself to care.

Ezra slanted his mouth to yours and sank his teeth into your lower lip, pulling it outward as obscene wet noises continued unabated. The pressure between your legs was building and you didn’t know if you could handle it, didn’t know how to ride this wave but your legs were shaking, your head thrown back and mouth open.

Ezra watched your face with his forehead resting against yours, tracking your frantic eyes roaming wide, blown black with lust. He whispered low, almost imperceptible.

“.....yesyesyesyesyesyes…….”

When your dam burst this time it was different, deeper. You could not cry, you could not scream. You convulsed, almost folding in half. You had no control over your movements. You were dimly aware that you’d soaked your mattress, you’d soaked Ezra’s fingers and he swore thickly as you clamped and squeezed and fluttered around his hand.

“Look at you Dove, you’re doing _so well_ for me. So tight, so perfect. I have dreamt of exactly this for endless nights. It has been an exquisite torture to lie mere feet from you and deprive myself of this gift, resplendent before me.”

Your hands flew to the sides of his face, grabbing the hair that curled around his ears. You pulled his face down to yours and kissed him, groaning into his mouth as your tongue ran along his teeth. You tried to pour into it every ounce of emotion you felt, desire and abandon still flashing and sparking. You ran one hand down his chest, down the front of his pants and through the curls on the soft flesh of his groin. Ezra stilled, mouth open and gasping when you wrapped your hand around his cock. It was larger than you’d anticipated and you paused mid-stroke, stilling your hand on the weeping head. He was hot and leaking onto your hand.

Ezra’s eyes were squeezed tight, panting rapidly against the side of your neck. He moaned softly as he moved his hand across the flesh of your breasts, pausing to pull and squeeze your nipples. You gasped at the pinching sensation shooting into you; your cunt clenched in response.

“I want you in my mouth,” you husked out, lowering your hand further to cup his balls. Ezra hissed, his brow creasing.

“I….I fear I won’t last long enough if that sinful mouth comes anywhere near to where I need you,” he whispered, and his voice was straining and desperate as he thrust into your slick palm. You craned your face upward, teeth scraping against his jaw.

“Then fuck me, Ezra.”

He swallowed thickly, then reached down with a trembling hand, rushing to free himself. You glanced down, eyes widening as he came into view, thick and curving up toward his stomach. He looked as big as he’d felt. You moved to help him remove his pants fully, but his hand quickly moved to still your wrist.

“I meant what I said, it’s been quite a few stands since I’ve indulged in pleasures of the flesh. Next time, perhaps, I will properly show my affections for you, however at present moment I fear I will reach my end by the time I have properly disrobed.”

Your hand cupped his cheek as you nodded, biting your lip as Ezra moved to settle between your spread legs. Your thighs moved to frame his hips as he positioned himself at your opening. He once again leaned his forehead against yours, locking eyes with you, and began to enter you.

The stretch was immediate and overwhelming. You thought he may have hurt you, had you not been so primed. His mouth hung open, eyes trained on yours until he reached your end and rolled them backward. You were split open on his cock, you had never felt so full, the sensations an incredible ache of indescribable pleasure. You involuntarily twitched around him and Ezra groaned and panted, seemingly overwhelmed in his own right.

“I have never…..in all my years. Felt something….as fucking _heavenly_ …..” He drew back, the drag of him forcing your stretched lips to cling to him obscenely. The drag made you drunk on him, you growled and sank your teeth into his shoulder. The sound of him advancing on you once more, meeting your tight resistance and pushing through, was charging the air around you. Electric. He angled his hips downward and stars, he found that spot again, and you could tell he was losing control, he raked your shirt up around your neck and pawed desperately at your breasts and he leaned forward and sighed your name.

His thumb notched between your lips as you gasped his name back at him.

“....fuck…”

He angled his hips back once more, and his next thrust was sudden and unexpected and _hard_ , you cried out after gulping in air and he wasn’t stopping, he drove into you and into that spot over and over and over and you felt the tears streaming down your face. You were sobbing brokenly, you had never felt so powerless over the feel of him breaking you, tearing you apart in a way you never imagined existed. The world did not exist, pain and hurt and suffering did not exist, it was just you and Ezra in this universe, every thrust and gasp a prayer of thanks to whatever God existed that allowed this to happen, allowed you to feel like this. You had lost the power of speech, you could only cry and whimper and gasp, broken with pleasure. Ezra’s rhythm began to falter. He placed his hand around your neck and growled between clenched teeth.

“Let the whole of the Green hear you, how I mark you deep enough to make you mine for the rest of your days. Let the world shake apart with the _force of my love for you_.”

At that, his hips stilled as his orgasm hit. The very act of him coming seemed to trigger your own release, and once again you shook and arched, but you only had the strength to gasp and whimper and sob softly and your hips jerked upward and twitched of their own volition.

He spilled into you, groaning loudly, biting at any exposed flesh he could find before collapsing onto you. You wound your arms around his neck. You remained dazed and overwhelmed by what had transpired. Your mind was blank, you were wrung out. Ezra slid to the side of you with a sigh and pressed his lips against your temple. His hand reached into your hair and he stroked his fingers in circles against your scalp. His breathing evened quickly, and for the first time since you’d landed on this cursed moon you fell into deep and dreamless sleep.

  
  



	5. Part Five

_ Waxing Gibbous  _

_ Pairing: Ezra + femNurse! Reader _

_ Rating: Hard M / 18+ ONLY _

_ * Warnings: Some minor angst/ miscommunication/ SMUT (m/f oral, fingering, hand job, spicy kisses) Can’t stop the smut train baybeeee choo choo motherfuckers _

_ * Summary: You process the events of the night before, and wonder about your place with Ezra and on the Green _

_ * Word Count: 3879 _

_ *Part ONE* *Part TWO* *Part THREE* *Part FOUR* _

PART FIVE

  
  


You Awoke the next morning feeling as if it were some erotic fever dream. You stretched your arm out across the emptiness of the cot pushed beside yours. It was only when you moved to roll onto your back that the deep pang of soreness between your legs reminded you that, yes, what you’d wanted for months had actually happened, and you did indeed feel ruined.

Ezra appeared to have left the tent in the early morning haze. You gazed upward at the ceiling of the tent, at the support beams that vaulted the cloth walls. Things were going to be different, that you knew. It did not make you any less apprehensive.

_ He had told you he loved you _ . Or, more accurately, that he  _ had love _ for you.

You could not forget the tenderness he’d shown you after you were attacked, but you were well aware that things said in the heat of passion were often a product of an intense moment and were not necessarily reflective of the truth. You chided yourself for ruminating; he’d been a nanosecond from coming inside of a warm body for the first time in undoubtedly several months. From your admittedly limited sexual experiences, proclamations of love and devotion and promises of ardent follow-through were often expressed in the heat of the moment, never to be mentioned again. You usually never  _ saw _ them again.

This was different, of course, as you literally  _ could not _ leave. You were both stranded, though you still kept up the pretense of harvesting in the event an opportunity to escape should present itself. The chance of this happening had begun to seem less and less likely- the heyday of the aurelac rush had long since come and gone, and the remaining groups of adventurers to the Green operated more or less on whispered rumors and folklore.

The zipper of the tent pulled upward, and Ezra emerged. The flaps were quickly refastened, and he moved to whip his helmet off as you shyly pulled your worn blanket up to your neck. You had been wanton and vocal the night before, but in the light of the morning you felt fragile, unsure. Ezra looked to you, seemingly amused by your sudden modesty. The corner of his mouth tilted up, his warm brown eyes twinkled. The blond patch of hair, a rogue among it’s dark compatriots, stuck out wildly in response to the chaotic divestment of his helmet. He wasn’t even close to you and your heart started pounding.

“Ah, good morning to you, Dove. I was hoping you would continue your slumber a bit longer. I have spent some time in the early light surveying the Green for signs of life and transport, not necessarily in that order, of course.”

In the months since you’d first met him in the clearing on that fateful day, his arm had fully recovered thanks to your ministrations- all that remained was a cratered, puckering pink scar on the skin of his bicep. He wore a threadbare grey tee under his suit and this drew your eye to the wound. If something were to happen to you, if this did not pan out and you either died or escaped, were separated, would he remember you when he saw his scar? Would it be with fondness, or would it only remind him of how traumatic this all was? 

_ Why am I thinking like this? _

It was the fact that he had admitted, out loud, that he was looking for a way out, a way off of the Green. You knew that you would both die if you could not find a way to go, it was only logical. So why were you nursing this pang of melancholy that had emerged when you’d awoken to find his cot empty?

You came back to yourself, and noted the concern etched on Ezra’s face as he contemplated you.

“Have I said or done something to upset you, Dove? That has rendered you mute?”

He moved across the floor of the tent with a lithe grace and perched on the edge of your cot, placing a hand on your knee.

“Are you feeling alright?”

You sighed, smiling softly when you felt his touch on you, warm and heavy. “Better than alright, Ez. I….can’t….I guess I’m still trying to wrap my head around what happened last night.”

He creased his brow in contemplation and turned to face you fully. “I must admit, I myself did not envision such intimacy occurring between us in the manner it did. I…. fear I may have been a fair bit rougher than I meant to be at the outset. I need you to be truthful if I hurt you in any way.”

You bit your lip, and your neck and face felt hot. Flashes of him caging you, filling you, his words, hot breath and hands, the way the cot had creaked like it was pleading for its life…

“I….really loved everything about last night. It’s been a long time since I’ve been with anyone...like that. So honestly, I’m sore. But in a...good way?”

He surged forward, framing your face with his hands. His voice left his plush lips in a hoarse whisper. His eyes held yours, hypnotic and deep.

“Will you feel me with every step you take today? I’m going to watch you. I have never felt such intensity with anyone the way I felt it when we took our pleasure last night. I don’t want it to stop.”

You were flushed, your ears buzzed. Your mind filled with static. How could he practically dismantle you in this way with only words? You realized your mouth was hanging open. You snapped it shut and swallowed audibly.

Ezra’s clever tongue darted to wet his lips before squeezing your knee and standing.

“Get dressed, Dove. We’ve a day ahead of us.”

  
  


It was another hot day in the Green, and you both resumed your digging, harvesting and cataloguing as if it were any other afternoon. For all intents and purposes, it was. Ezra waxed poetic about the juxtaposition of the beauty surrounding you beside the deadliness of the air, how the regular exchange of oxygen, hydrogen and carbon dioxide were perverted carbon copies of the vegetation you were both used to which processed and sustained an atmosphere more life-sustaining. 

You hummed at the appropriate moments, but your mind was on your conversation in the tent. What he had said to you seemed indicative of the fact that he intended to continue a physical relationship. It made you feel equal parts giddy and insecure. You frowned in thought.

_ Snap the fuck out of it. You’re no delicate, blushing maiden. You know yourself. You’re seriously thinking like some incapable, dependent damsel the second you get some good dick?? _

__ Except you moved a certain way while crouching down and you winced, gasping softly.

Ezra stopped mid-sentence and turned his gaze toward you, his eyes dark, his tongue once again flicking out to moisten his lips.

“Are you injured, little Dove?” he asked, smiling softly.

“Uh, no, not exactly. You know, what I told you before...I’m fine, really.”

He sauntered over to you and held out his hand. You grasped it, and he pulled you to your feet so that your helmets were touching.

“As cocky as I may have seemed at the outset in regards to the way I left my mark on you, do not think it is no little concern to me to see your movements impaired. My words were not meant to denote any sadistic pleasure taken in regards to your objective discomfort.”

His hands were stroking gently up and down your arms as he spoke.

You shrugged under his hands, a flash of annoyance crossing your features.

“I’m really fine, Ez. I’m not some wilting flower that you’ve irreparably damaged with your Godlike virility. I promise you, my delicate, blushing womanhood will recover.”

Ezra cocked an eyebrow in surprise. His hands stilled as he paused a beat before responding.

“Now that is something I would not anticipate. The thought that for one moment I consider you anything less than an equal, in fact a superior to myself in several ways, not the least of which include cunning and resilience. It saddens me that you think that of me.”

All at once you felt like a jerk. Damn this emotional lability, damn this stubborn pride. Ezra was genuinely concerned that you were in pain, and you were jumping at the opportunity to argue semantics and gender roles. On a toxic planet you were both stranded on, no less.

You reached for his gloved hand, squeezing firmly. His hand squeezed back, equally firm.

“I don’t know why I said that, Ezra. I don’t know what’s gotten into me. I sound like an asshole, I’m sorry.”

You’ve _ gotten into me _ .

  
  


You were back in the tent after determining that the day's work had finished. It was quiet, Ezra ruminated. The tension had surely rebuilt itself over the course of the day, there was only so much harvesting, so much concentration on work that could be accomplished, before it came to this. The both of you, stripped to your thermals. You lay as you had countless times before, facing one another on your cots. Ezra swept his thumb lazily back and forth across your knuckles. You felt like you could drown in the depths of him. 

“I’m sorry again about what I said to you today. I don’t know why I said it. I didn’t mean it.”

“Though you have nothing to apologize for, Dove, I will readily accept if it will still the turbulence within you. I meant what I said, and I have you to thank for every bit of happiness I doubted I’d ever feel in this Kevva-forsaken place. My arm, my livelihood. My life. If not for you I’d have faded forgotten like so many other poor, foolish dupes. My very survival is due to your strength and intellect.”

You felt full to bursting at his words, overwhelmed by his sincerity. You couldn’t respond, so you propelled yourself forward and pressed your lips to his desperately. He stilled only momentarily, startled at your boldness, before he responded hungrily. Lips slid, teeth clashed. His tongue begged entry into your mouth, which you granted with a whimper. He tasted somehow sweet, wild. His breaths gasped into your mouth, you pushed your own back into him. Hands tangled in hair. You had yet to see him unclothed, you reached out and grasped his shirt in your needy fist. Ezra immediately took the hint and stripped it. You removed your own and his hands were at once on your breasts, large warm hands that enveloped each in turn, greedy and restless. He couldn’t touch enough of you at once.

His hands moved to your waist, tearing at your pants. You helped him pull them off and fling them to the ground. You felt like you were radiating heat, you were a thermal detonator. Ezra pinched your nipple, applying slight pressure into the bud with his thumb nail. Your nerves sparked and sang, your ass arching off of your cot like you’d been hit by an electrical current.

You gasped, your trembling hands moving to divest him of his pants.

His hand shot down to still yours. You both paused, the only sound within the confines of your quarters were the loud gasps that echoed between you.

“Is….is something wrong?”

Ezra fought to still his breathing. “Sweet girl, I have not forgotten my rough congress with you the night before. I do not want to risk exacerbating your discomfort. You should recover, first, from our mutual enthusiasm.”

You groaned in frustration. “I’ll be fine. Ezra, I promise you won’t break me.”

You palmed him through his trousers, Kevva he was so hard. So hot. You swore you were salivating. Ezra stilled, breath held in an attempt to maintain his composure.

“Please grant me this, at least for my own peace of mind. Just for tonight. Allow me, if I may, to indulge in an alternate form of intimacy, one which I’ve dreamed of sharing with you since your first trick with the Sater.” The last sentence was gritted out between clenched teeth.

Your eyes wide, you bit your lip and barely finished a frenzied nod before Ezra was pinning your hands above your head and scraping his teeth against the juncture of your neck and shoulder. It was somehow different, more measured, if no less intense. You let a shiver run through your body as Ezra moved down to first one breast, then the other. He opened his mouth wide and covered the entirety of your nipple and  _ sucked _ . You gasped, already overwhelmed. You felt as if you could lose your mind as he possessed you. Teeth scraped and teased, and he made sure the peak of your breast was properly slicked before repeating the motions on your other breast. You keened out into the cycled air of the tent as the wet surface of your skin cooled, warring with the sinful furnace of Ezra’s mouth on your other breast.

He disengaged, intentions clear as he continued to kiss, lick, and nip down the length of your body. You were struck mute and trembling. You didn’t realize he had let go of your hands, and you were so mesmerized that you kept them stationary above your head. Ezra reached your drenched core and settled between your legs, pressing feather-light kisses to your inner thighs as you whimpered. He was going to kill you. He paused, and as you realized he was beginning to part your inner folds you started and reflexively started to close your legs. Ezra huffed, placing a searing palm against the inside of your knee in protest.

“Don’t be shy, sweet girl. There is no shame here with me. I consider it a compliment of the highest order that you are blooming for me like this.” He moved to lay his head against the side of your thigh. He felt inches away from you. You could feel every warm exhale against your dripping sex, hypersensitive, attuned to every word and movement.

“Look at you,” he crooned reverently. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen arousal so profound. Glistening like a jewel. Every blushing fold spread open and ready. The temple of this divine cunt fluttering and  _ weeping _ for me.”

You choked out a broken groan at his words and tilted your hips toward him desperately. Impossibly, you felt him closer, his breaths tiny explosions on your swollen core. He groaned back in response and dragged his fingers languidly through your slick.

“.....smell so good…”

Before you could register his words he darted forward and licked from your clenching hole up to your clit, his tongue wide and flat. Ezra ran his tongue back down to your base before repeating the motion twice more.

It was a feeling so intense, sensation so overwhelming to you, that you could not speak, only throw your head back with eyes and mouth wide in a silent scream. Your hands hammered down to your sides and you tore at the sheets beneath you.

“....taste so  _ fucking _ good.”

You gasped his name like a prayer. You were incapable of speech, your mind blank. Over the din of white noise between your ears, you heard Ezra speaking your name reverently.

You forced your head up to meet his gaze. Your arousal was a wet sheen across his face, his eyes blown wide, hair wild. So beautiful.

“You still with me, Dove?” You could only give him another desperate nod.

You then watched, eyes wide and shocked, as Ezra opened his wicked mouth and let a strand of spittle drip down from his lips and roll down to coat your engorged clit.

“ _ Ezra _ ...oh my fucking God,” You moaned. He could kill you in this moment, snuff your life like a wasted candle and you would thank him.

When he next attached his mouth to you and began to tongue your fluttering cunt, you could not stop the noises that left your gasping mouth. You could not keep track of the groans, whimpers, screams, pleas that left you like an incantation. If you’d been able to form a coherent thought, you may have even supposed (correctly) that Ezra would be cataloguing every single one.

When he moved his mouth back to your aching clit, he replaced his tongue with two thick fingers and entered you easily. He began a slow, deep pace while his tongue danced across and upon your bud. Your legs began to shake of their own accord, muscles jumping and fluttering. Ezra placed a hand across your stomach to steady you, murmuring low praises.

“I’ve got you. I’ve got you. So good. Come for me sweetheart. Let go, release onto my tongue, spill your ecstasy into my mouth.”

He resumed the labor of his fingers within your walls and latched his mouth to your bud and began sucking.

The pressure in your belly, between your legs, through your  _ limbs _ stretched tight and snapped, and you roared Ezra’s name into the void of the Green. You were shaking, you were flying apart, the world could be crumbling down around you, you did not care.

_ I’m dying _ , you thought. You could not think beyond the white-hot, searing pleasure that sparked through and lit up every nerve ending. Ezra worked you through your explosive release, easing you down with slow licks and kisses as he greedily consumed every drop of his victory. He finally relented and crawled back up your shaking body. He kissed you wantonly, gasping into your mouth. You tasted your own arousal and release on his lips and tongue- it was intoxicating. He kissed you as if he would die if he stopped, his hands cradling your face.

“Ezra,” you moaned, your breaths and heart rate finally beginning to slow. “Ezra, that was…..” You felt him smirk against your mouth. You gasped out a laugh and wound your arms around his shoulders.

“Proud of yourself, are you?” You swore on your soul that he  _ giggled. _

__ “While I must admit fault has never been found in my technique, I don’t believe I’ve ever had a response so….intense. You do wonders for my ego, Dovie.” He whispered, tucking his nose into your neck. You stroked his back, your limbs heavy and loose. You could have drifted away like this but for the hardness you felt against your hip.

“Hey, Ez?”

“Mmmfff.”

“What about you?”

To punctuate your point, your hand reached down to palm him through his trousers. Ezra’s demeanor immediately changed, lazy grin stilling as he gasped and groaned against you.

“I believe I told you I wanted you in my mouth last night, Ezra. I still do.”

“You don’t have to, sweet one. I wanted to take care of you tonight,” he gasped, even as he began to rock his hips into your open hand.

“I want to take care of you, too,” You whispered against his mouth. You were startled by the desire flooding into you once again- Ezra had fully wrung you out, you should be exhausted. Instead, the flames of your lust were stoked once again as you rolled him onto his back and began to undo his pants. Ezra stared down at you, his breathing hitched and baited. His hands were fisted on either side of him, he looked almost scared to move.

You revealed his swollen aching cock, red and weeping. He was so aroused the head of him was almost purple. You swore you could see his pronounced veins  _ pulsating _ . Your felt your cunt clench, further shocking you. You realized your mouth was watering.

“I need this divine cock in my mouth, Ezra. I want to watch you fall apart for me.”

Ezra whined, hands clutching in desperation as yours were only a short time before.

You flashed him a salacious grin and opened your mouth to spew your own string of saliva to cascade down the head of his cock. Ezra gasped, eyes wide.

“Turnabout is fair play, Sir.” 

Shudders racked his body as you lowered your head, placing delicate kisses at the base of him before working your way up. Ezra quickly became a panting, groaning mess, knocking his head into the pillow. The cords of his neck stood out in stark relief as his hips canted upward in search of more of your mouth, more of  _ anything _ .

“Please, sweet girl,” he moaned, is voice thin and reedy, “Please. I need more….”

You glanced up at him as your hand slowly pumped his length, considering, before once again leaning forward. Without preamble you opened your mouth and took him down as far as you could. The cries that erupted from him at your action could have awakened any floater within a 15-mile radius. You wanted to hear it again, so you dislodged him from your mouth before repeating your action. You clasped hour hands around the sizable part of him that did not fit, lacing your fingers together. You pressed your palms against the slick shaft and worked him slowly and steadily while the obscene, wet noises coming from your mouth reverberated throughout your quarters.

Ezra was properly wrecked, sobbing and gasping, pleading for you to continue.

“You're going to kill me,” he whined, and it caused a fresh flood of arousal to run down the insides of your thighs. He was so, so close. You could feel his cock twitch and swell impossibly. You raised your eyes to meet his, mouth popping off of him, strands of spit stretching like cables between your parted lips and his glistening head. Catching your breath, you wiped the back of your hand across your mouth.

“Come in my mouth, Ezra.”

Ezra could only whimper in response, hands buried in your hair as you sank back onto him. He was painting your mouth and tongue with his seed. You struggled to swallow it all, it seemed neverending. Ezra sobbed, shouting half-formed words and unintelligible praises into the air. His hips twitched and rolled up rhythmically as you struggled to keep him captured within the confines of your mouth. 

You swallowed each spurt eagerly until Ezra tugged at your hair, hypersensitized, to pull you up his chest. His limbs trembled in aftershocks as his arms wrapped around you. His heart continued to hammer in his chest as you lay your head on him. You reached a hand up to cup his face. Ezra leaned into it, turning his head and placing a kiss to the palm of your hand.

“You are magical, Dove. Transcendent. I do not deserve you.”

You yawned and burrowed your head into the crook of his neck. You were suddenly exhausted. 

You both stayed entwined on your cots, breaths slowing and steadying as you both found your slumber. Inhaling as you exhaled, you dreamed of escape, daring to hope against hope that there was a way to escape and make your way to something better. 

Something you both deserved.

  
  



	6. Part Six

_ Waxing Gibbous  _

_ Pairing: Ezra + femNurse! Reader _

_ Rating: Hard M / 18+ ONLY _

_ * Warnings: Angst, illness  _

_ * Summary: You must find your way of off the Green as the toxic effects of your environment finally take hold. _

_ * Word Count: ~1400 or so _

_ *Part ONE* *Part TWO* *Part THREE* *Part FOUR* *Part FIVE* _

  
  


PART SIX

Time moved on the Green like a boulder rolling down a hill, careening quickly with a wicked force of gravity until it reached one of many plateaus or stop-gaps, and it then it. Crawled. 

Your perception of time often depended on what was happening on any given day, and increasingly you grew weary and felt the drag of days like a weight of sand around your shoulders. You grew restless.

Each day melted into another, hot and mundane. You began to yearn for your escape, to turn over the ramifications of having to stay over in your mind like a gruesome obsession. You tried to keep it down, swallow your despair. It wouldn’t help anything to complain, to wring your hands and wail over the unfairness of your circumstances. You were stranded here and that was that. You tried to keep your head down, eyes forward, and slog through each day as it stretched into a dull eternity. 

Ezra was nothing if not perceptive. He would softly comment on the mournful gaze that would cross your face and cloud your eyes. How it was agony for him, how he would do anything to take this away. You did not want to burden him, you hated that he worried about you. You would flash him as winning a smile as you could muster, but it did not reach your eyes. Your only comfort was in his arms, in the way that he’d come to you in the tent and wordlessly wrap his arms around you. Hold you so close to him, as if he were trying to absorb you, to siphon off your sadness. Sometimes he held you because he was sad too. At night, you clung to one another as if afraid you’d drift away.

It was during one particularly hot and oppressive morning that you awoke once again alone. It happened from time to time, more often now than in the past. Ezra would awaken before the dawn, suiting up and trekking out into the Green, looking for other life, any sign of anything that could help get you gone from here. He would invariably return and remove his helmet with a heavy sigh.

_ “Next time, perhaps.” _

_ “We’re getting low on food, Ez.” _

_ “I know.” _

_ “We can’t eat aurelac, Ez.” _

_ “I know.” _

_ “We need to come up with a contingency plan for when it happens.” _

_ “We will do whatever we must.” _

Something you didn’t discuss as often was the dry, hacking coughs you were developing. Your air cycler was working less efficiently, a product of unavoidable overuse. The cyclers were meant to be finite, replaced every few months. You’d taken to cleaning the filters as well as you could, but you’d had to wear your helmets while you cleaned, and those filters were beginning to fail as well.

So when you awoke on that particular morning you were coughing so forcefully you retched. You leaned over the side of the cot and spit. It was grey. You knew now you would die here, and it would be torturous and slow. The spores would build in the sacs of your lungs until you could do nothing more than gasp weakly for each gulp of air.

When Ezra returned, he whipped off his helmet much more forcefully than usual. He rushed to you and fell to his knees. You knew immediately something was different- his eyes were wide and wild, his hands trembled on the thin, rumpled blankets.

“I saw a streak. In the sky. A vessel burning up on entry. Someone landed just west of here...it happened right before my eyes. We may have a spectre of hope in this hell, Dove.”

You stared at him, eyes wide and unbelieving.

“You…..you’re sure??”

“I swear to you, may Kevva strike me down where I kneel. It has to be a cruiser or drop-pod by the size of the flames.”

You reached out to grab his hand, squeezing. His eyes searched your face.

“I’ll get dressed.”

This was a gift, and you viewed it as such. But you knew that you both needed to be so, so careful. You did not know who these interlopers were, you did not know their intentions or the condition of their craft. Landing could be rough in the heavily forested Green, if the vessel was a smaller one, as Ezra seemed to think, it may work to your advantage. You needed to be sure.

You quickly suited up, helmet on, filter rattling weakly. You took what you could, but you did not plan to return. The aurelac you’d harvested over the course of months was packed away to bursting in your rucksacks, and there was room for little else. You’d each grabbed some water and a few nutri-bars. You paused to sweep one last look around the tent where you’d cried, where you’d held low conversation and read and fucked. Events of the past few hours had happened so fast that your head was spinning, strangely blank. You were leaving. You were going to a means of escape or to your death. You felt calm about either option in the stillness of the morning.

You thanked the tent silently, and you hoped it burned.

Ezra led the way, and you started your journey. He’d estimated that you should reach your target by early afternoon.

Your filters were connected for the time being to maximize filtration. This did not stop your unease as you watched the condensation of your breath forming against the plexi of your viewing portal. Every few minutes either Ezra or yourself would cough. It was a dry, barking sound over the static of the comlink. For the most part you remained silent and tried to stick to hand signals when a change in terrain or pace needed to be relayed between you. You had to conserve oxygen, and speaking was an undue exertion unless strictly necessary.

You’d come upon the burned clearing a bit before Ezra’s projection, judging by the position of the anchoring planet in the sky. The vessel was indeed a cruiser, which was fortuitous in that it moved quicker and offered more stability than a pod.

You both crouched well away from the cruiser, out of sight. Ezra held his thrower at his side, you had his blaster at your waist. You waited.

A particularly nasty coughing fit doubled you over at one point. You coughed so long and hard that your vision began to swim, black dots sparking over the horizon of your sight.

Ezra held onto you ensuring you would not fall over into the moss under your feet. His arm circled your shoulders. When the fit had eventually and blessedly passed his hand was rubbing firm circles into your back. His helmet knocked against yours. When you raised your eyes to his, fear and heartbreak were plain on his face. You understood that things had progressed to the point where he could no longer hide this from you. Your chest ached and burned.

A commotion ahead in the clearing broke the spell of your mutual despair. You both froze before turning forward towards the craft.

The hatch was opening, there was movement from within. Eventually a platform extended to the ground below, and two figures shambled forward with a third held between them.

They appeared to be mercenaries, holding fast to a restrained prisoner. The prisoner kicked and pulled weakly between them- they had most likely been sedated. Not enough to feel numb to the agony of suffocation, but enough to be handled without too much trouble.

You were looking at an execution crew.

The mercs were grunting and growling back and forth in a language you did not recognize. 

Ezra remained frozen beside you, eyes trained ahead razor-sharp. Predatory. 

Your hand on your blaster, you cleared your head of thought as the first waves of adrenaline started pumping through you. Slowly, so slowly, Ezra reached for you. He clasped your hand. Squeezed three times. His eyes moved to catch yours. An imperceptible nod.

You nodded back. 

They had to die.

After one more impossible beat of pregnant inaction you both stood and stepped forward.

  
  



	7. Part Seven

Waxing Gibbous   
Pairing: Ezra + femNurse! Reader  
Rating: Hard M / 18+ ONLY

* Warnings: Angst/ violence/ blood/ gore/ injury  
* Summary: Get Gone or Get Dead  
* Word Count: ~1400  
*Part ONE* *Part TWO* *Part THREE* *Part FOUR* *Part FIVE* *Part SIX*

PART SEVEN

When you were a child, you’d come upon a dying bird on the road near your home. It had lain on its side in a small puddle of blood. Its eyes had glittered like jewels into the heat of the summer sun. Its beak was open, it was gaping and gasping. Perhaps it had flown into a window; more likely, a roaming cat had made it a cruel plaything before becoming bored and moving on. You had stood, transfixed, willing it to die. Your young girl’s heart could not bear to watch its agony, but you did not possess the strength of character to crush its skull or snap its neck. You were too squeamish and cowardly to extend that kindness.  
You had walked away.  
Now, you were walking willingly towards death. Yours or another’s, you did not know. There were three beating hearts between you and the cruiser, then to the sling-back the cruiser had undoubtedly come from.  
Blaster raised you tried to make yourself tall on the Green. You kept your eyes fierce, zeroed in on the two mercs. Ezra was beside you, thrower cocked at his shoulder. Neither of you spoke.   
The mercenaries, by virtue of being in a clearing, noticed both of you immediately and met your approach with weapons drawn and guttural shouting. There had been a time in the past when Ezra would have approached the situation with melodious bargaining and other clever salesmanship before resorting to violence. This was different, every atom in the atmosphere was charged with desperation, vibrating with finality. Either they die or you do- there was no in-between now.  
Before either could fire Ezra leveled his thrower at the first merc and discharged it. There was a muffled bang that reached your ears as you saw blood bloom in the fabric of the merc’s chest. He fired a beat later, but the shock of impact threw his shot well wide of you and ricocheted somewhere to the left of the clearing. The second merc, momentarily thrown by sight of his partner sinking to his knees, recovered and raised his own blaster toward you. You aimed your own weapon and pressed the trigger.  
Click.  
Shit.  
You barely had time to process the fact that the blaster had jammed on you before an explosion of white-hot pain hit your shoulder. You were spun like a top. Your world was tipping, spinning. Rotten air was knocked out of you and you were on your back. You looked to your shoulder to see crimson spreading. More blood on your suit. It hurt so much you couldn’t speak, only hiss through clenched teeth. You forced yourself to sit up and face what was coming- you refused to die on your back. You wheezed audibly, heard Ezra’s breathing match your own over your comlink.  
Ezra. You looked up from your place on the ground to see him upon the second merc. You did not need to see his face to read the intention on it. Ezra killing with his hands was its own unique form of dark intimacy, and you could picture his eyes wide and dark, jaw clenched with rage. You knew that every single thing he did, either gentle or feral, was accomplished with an abundance of emotion. You saw the knife in Ezra’s hand that he’d removed from his boot and you watched him plunge it into the chest of the mercenary again and again. When the thrashing body finally stilled, Ezra shambled to his feet. His breathing sounded like an underwater turbine. Agonal. He was coming toward you, swaying slightly. You were struggling to get to your feet. Your shoulder felt as if it was skewered by an iron pike.  
He shakily held his hand out to you. You stumbled, almost pulling him down with you. Finally you stood, swaying drunkenly in the clearing. You noted Ezra’s suit, covered in blood spatter and gore, mirrored your own when you had first met. His face looked gray and ashen, his eyes hollow and sunken. It became quickly apparent that his actions had taken any last reserve he was saving. He was closer to his own end than you were, and for the first time you were overcome by terror. You needed to keep your breathing even to save your deteriorating oxygen. You needed to swallow your tears and prevent any further dehydration. Yet here you were, gasping and sobbing. Ezra looked like a ghost and his lips were so dry, so cracked, with a faint tint of blue seeping into his flesh. You didn’t care about your shoulder, you’d hack it off in an instant to prevent this man from ever having to look like this to save you, to exert himself to the point of death because your blaster had jammed.  
I can’t lose you.  
I can’t lose you.  
My fucking Gods I cannot lose you.  
In desperation you were tugging him, pulling him toward the cruiser. You paused only to grab the blaster that lay in the moss beside the ruined body of the mercenary. The prisoner had come back to himself somewhat during the fracas, he was clumsily priming the thrower, his hands shaking. You walked up to him and pressed the blaster to his helmet. He paused as soon as he felt you and made a grab for the back of your knee. You thought of the dying bird.  
You fired. This time, there was no jam. The helmet imploded with a muffled pop and the prisoner slumped backward.  
You pushed Ezra up the ramp. You felt like it took hours to find the toggle that would retract it and close the cruiser door. You then searched frantically for the button that would switch on the air filter. When you found that and slammed the heel of your hand into it you clawed at the clasps to your helmet. When you’d finally managed to whip it off one-handed you took your first gulp of optimally filtered air in months.   
Ezra.  
He had managed to reach the passenger seat of the craft before he’d collapsed. His helmet was still on. You did not have the strength to rush to him on your feet, so you crawled to him on your knees. You unclasped his helmet clumsily the way you had your own and removed it as carefully, as reverently as you could. You realized you’d started crying again.  
“Ezra,” you whispered, cradling his head in your hand.  
He stirred slowly, he sounded like a man drowning. His eyes fluttered open, vague and lethargic before finally focusing on yours.  
“Dove,” you could barely hear him. “......don’t. Don’t leave me.”  
You didn’t know how, but you were crying harder. You felt snot touch your upper lip, your breaths hitched and croaked.  
“I will never leave you, Ezra. I am bound to you, always. We’re getting off this moon. We’re going. Now.”  
He leaned his head against the back of the seat.  
“I love you, Dove. So much…”  
You leaned forward and pressed a shaking kiss to his hairline, right below his mallen streak. You reached out to smooth away the wetness you’d left there.  
“And I love you. And I’m getting you help as soon as we get to the sling. I’m buckling you in, okay?”  
It wouldn’t have taken you so long but your fingers felt numb, clumsy. It was necessary for you to use both hands to fasten his clasp and you bit down a cry as you pressed down to engage the clasp. You noticed the top of your suit was becoming saturated. You felt wholly indifferent to your injury while you ensured Ezra was as secured as possible. He had soon lost consciousness, his head lolling to rest on his shoulder as he breathed steadily, if not quietly.  
As soon as you finished you crawled to the pilot’s seat and noted with relief that as the cruiser was a rental it had an operations manual at the console. You followed the steps you had with Ezra in ensuring you were properly strapped in, this time ignoring the stabbing heat in your shoulder. You followed each step pictured and gasped out a rough, rattled laugh as you felt, then heard the boosters engage.  
You had dimly expected the final joke to be a mechanical failure of some sort, yet the cruiser soon lifted out of the trees and you steered it toward the coordinates displayed on the screen. If not for your illness you felt as if you’d be screaming. You glanced out the window one final time at the cursed terrain of the Green and swore to yourself that you’d gladly die before ever returning.


	8. Part Eight

Waxing Gibbous   
Pairing: Ezra + femNurse! Reader  
Rating: Hard M / 18+ ONLY

* Warnings: None really, maybe more angst/ comfort  
* Summary: You arrive on Central and begin your recoveries.  
* Word Count: ~1500  
*Part ONE* *Part TWO* *Part THREE* *Part FOUR* *Part FIVE* *Part SIX* *Part SEVEN*

PART EIGHT

If you had fled the Green moon even ten minutes later, Ezra would have died. That was the grim information relayed to you by the sling-back medic after he’d been rushed to a med cot, given high-flow oxygen and sedated. He was critically ill. You’d been told immediately upon arrival and quick assessment that once you reached the Pug you were going to be transferred directly to a teaching hospital on Central.You were faring a bit better, but not by much. Your shoulder had been cleaned and bandaged. As you were conscious, you were given supplemental oxygen through a nasal cannula.  
The medic had attempted to press for some detail concerning how you’d both ended up in such states. Exhausted and struck numb, you’d simply shrugged and moved to rearrange the intravenous line of lactated ringer’s solution going into the catheter inserted into the top of your forearm. The machine had started beeping, and the sound was like a hammer to your skull.  
Once you reached the Pug things moved quickly indeed. Transport was coordinated in the Pug med bay and a nurse approached you, stating that she would be taking you into an exam room to obtain an updated set of vitals and enter your information into their data system. You had refused.  
“I’m not leaving him.”  
Clearing his throat, the nurse tried to explain the protocol he had to follow. You held up your hand to still his speech.  
“Save it. You won’t change my mind. I’m not leaving him.”

***

Once on the transport you’d been able to keep your eyes open for perhaps twenty minutes. You’d passed out sitting on the hard metal bench with your head slumped forward onto Ezra’s cot, your hand clasping his.

***

Central was cacophonic. After the eerie quiet of the Green the sounds, chatter, colors and thrumming life surrounding you was beating into your brain like a staccato mace. Your head throbbed. You flinched away from the shoulders brushing past you. You were close to panic, overwhelmed by the sensory overload. You took deep, measured breaths. You stayed as close to Ezra’s cot as possible. You had to resist the urge to climb into it with him and throw a blanket over your head.  
They were going to have to take Ezra away from you. You knew this logically. He was fragile. Needed intubation, needed close surveillance. He was most likely septic at this point and it was uncertain if the damage he’d suffered to his lung tissue would be permanent. You knew he might still die. You knew this, and you wept openly, pitifully.  
“WAIT!” you’d croaked out, shakily grasping the shoulder of the ICU nurse who had begun rushing him down the hallway for STAT bloodwork.  
She’d turned to you with sympathy shading her features.  
You gazed at her name badge through waterfalls.  
“....Mollen. That’s your name?”  
A pause. “Yes,” she’d replied softly. You knew you needed to trust her.  
“His feet get cold at night. Only at night, otherwise he says they’re like furnaces. He can’t sleep well if his feet aren’t covered. Please cover his feet. Please,” you’d choked.  
She had given you a small, sad smile. “Of course.”  
“Thank you, Mollen.”  
You had stood pathetically twisting your hands together with tears coursing unabashed until Ezra turned a corner and disappeared from you.

***

“Prognosis is precarious,” One of the physicians had pulled you into a private room to go over findings with you. You had since been seen and treated; miraculously you had not needed surgery, though you would most likely have permanent nerve damage to your thumb and two fingers on your left hand. You’d been told that you’d most likely be in the hospital for a week or two; you needed IV antibiotics and respiratory therapy in addition to wound care.  
You’d requested a private room as close to the ICU as possible, passing a piece of aurelac to the Intake Administrator. He’d accepted with wide eyes, and you’d gotten your room.  
The doctor was solemn as she looked over the rims of her glasses at you.  
“Your partner has diffuse opacities in the lower lobes of his lungs. The left is partially collapsed. We’ve intubated him, as you know, to allow his lungs time to rest and strengthen. He is septic, and he’s being treated with an experimental cocktail of three different antibiotics, dexamethasone for inflammation, and vasopressors to maintain his blood pressure.   
“Fortunately, his body is strong and his kidney function is improving. He has remained without a fever for the past eight hours, so that is reassuring. If he continues to show improvement I am fairly confident that we can begin planning for extubation within the next two to three days. If he can tolerate extubation and begin breathing on his own, we can start weaning his oxygen and begin to wake him up.”  
Though you knew what you were walking into, you steeled yourself.   
You entered his room and stood a moment to process the sheer enormity of the amount  
of medical equipment keeping Ezra alive. You took in the tubes and wires, the bags of   
fluid infusing through catheters, the softly beeping sensors. When you were not in your   
room or engaged in your own treatments, you were here. You pulled up the chair that  
Mollen had placed especially for you, and you began your silent vigil once again.  
Ezra looked so small in that bed, so fragile. He was dwarfed by the machinations  
surrounding him. He was pale, wan. As you always did, you grasped his hand and  
squeezed, ran your thumb over his knuckles the way he’d once done with you.  
you talked to him softly, describing the room, going over what had happened since you  
had escaped the Green. You talked about your own treatments and progress. You   
described Central, how busy and bustling everything was, how many people flooded the   
streets each day. Theatres you’d seen across from your window, coffee shops and   
bars you wanted to explore with him. Your favorite activity was reading to him. You had  
spent a great deal discussing all manner of art, and Ezra loved to talk about books both  
well-loved and those he longed to read but had been unable to find. As you found  
yourself in the incomprehensible position of having more credits than you could ever   
imagine possessing, you had books delivered to your room.  
Ezra was extubated the day you received your last dose of antibiotics. You were due to  
be discharged in three days. His organ function had improved at a rate that had exceeded  
the expectations of his medical team. His encyclopedic list of medications had shortened reassuringly. He was strong enough to tolerate the extubation and was transitioned to a nasal cannula. You rejoiced in this, though your anxiety spiked as the physicians began the arduous task of bringing him out of sedation. It did not happen all at once as many thought, but gradually and in increments. It happened in sighs and twitches, thrashes and groans. You wondered if he dreamed. You hoped that he could hear you repeat your devotions.  
You had secured a lease downtown, finding a loft a block from the hospital. It was spacious, covered in windows that stretched, floor to ceiling, and opened onto a balcony that afforded you a breathless view of Central. You had never had something so nice in your life.   
You had been discharged for two days, you had started to plan how to turn your new space into a safe space for both you and Ezra, when you were alerted by the hospital that Ezra had awakened. He was asking for you.  
You doubt if your feet touched the ground as you rushed to the hospital, stopping only to catch your breath.  
You entered his room panting, vibrating.   
Ezra was sitting upright, the first time you’d seen him not supine in weeks. He was pale, he sported dark and sunken circles under his eyes. His hair was wildly curling, his blond streak sticking straight out. He was sipping gingerly on a cup of water with a shaking hand.  
Your Ezra. Beautiful Ezra.  
“.....Ez?”  
He looked upon you as if you were an apparition. He went to move shakily to his feet, and you were there before he could stand. Enveloping him in your arms, kissing his face, feeling him and inhaling whatever you could of him, of his vibrant life.  
Alive.  
You realized you were both weeping, you chuckled as you took turns wiping the wetness from one another’s face. When he spoke, his voice was rough, you knew it would take time for Ezra to regain his mellifluous cadence.   
“Beautiful star, our souls cannot escape one another, universe try as it might to tear us asunder.”  
“I missed you, Ezra. Sweet love, I’m never letting you out of my sight ever again. Ever.”  
“I wish you luck trying to part from me at this point, Dove.”  
You knew you’d done something right, standing against him.   
You knew you were home.


	9. Part Nine

_ Waxing Gibbous  _

_ Pairing: Ezra + femNurse! Reader _

_ Rating: Hard M / 18+ ONLY _

_ * Warnings: SMUT (mutual masturbation, PIV sex), some plot too, comfort _

_ * Summary: Ezra’s recovery continues. You introduce him to a new way of living, one he cannot immediately embrace. _

_ * Word Count: 2800 _

  
  


PART NINE

Ezra spent an additional three weeks in the hospital after he’d awakened. His recovery was arduous, but his medical team remained impressed by his sheer determination. The same drive he’d shown on the cursed moon to harvest, to succeed, to  _ survive _ , he showed to recover. Recover he did, working diligently with doctors and physical therapists seemingly around the clock.

You only went back to your loft to shower and change. You had rented a cot, not dissimilar to what you’d been used to before, and you slept beside him each night. You couldn’t stop yourself from awakening several times in the night to ensure he was still there, still breathing. He’d long since been moved out of the ICU and into a room on the Med-Surg unit. He’d proceeded to charm each doctor, nurse, custodian and aide with equal amounts of wit and candor. They would make special trips to his room to sneak him his favorite treats and second helpings of his favorite meals under the guise of “needing to put weight back on.” Ezra would thank them graciously, grinning conspiratorially. 

The first time he’d walked three laps around the unit without any assistance was the day you finally knew he was going to be okay. He was told that afternoon that he would be going home in a week. You had thrown your arms around him as he’d laughed and knocked sideways into his bedside table.

That night, you’d crawled into his hospital bed, squeezing in beside him. You nestled yourself into his warmth, his arms reflexively winding around you to pull you closer. Ezra sighed and hummed into your hair. You’d thought him still asleep, until he whispered softly into the darkness.

“..... _ Dove. Can’t wait to be home with you _ ….” His large, warm hand rubbed up and down your back before circling around your hip, then your waist.

“.... _ can’t wait to be in a bed with you. A real bed _ .” His fingers spread, his hand coasted lazily up your abdomen and palmed your breast. Your soft gasp echoed into the dark hospital room as you arched into his palm. His fingers zeroed in on a nipple, tugging through the thin material of your tank top. You mewled, hot explosive breaths against his chest. When he craned his head down to bring his mouth to yours he kissed you slowly, deeply, his tongue darting and curling. You bit at his bottom lip and gasped into his hot, sinful mouth.

“ _ Ezra, you’re killing me _ .” You felt his lips curl wickedly upward. He began to speak to you lowly, in hoarse whispers, punctuating each thought with a nip to your throat, all the while pinching and pulling at you through the fabric of your shirt.

“.... _ Been dreaming of you. How you lose the ability to speak when I’m splitting you open. The sounds you make. The sounds that cunt makes when I rock into it. The way you shake when you fall apart _ ….”

He had nudged his knee in between your legs, and you found yourself rhythmically rocking your core against his thigh. The burning fullness between your legs was making you leak your fluids onto his skin, your clit grinding desperately onto him. You were certain he could feel you through your cotton shorts. You whimpered pitifully as he continued.

“ _ It’s killing you that we can’t do any more than this right now, in this bed. Anyone could walk right in, Dove _ .”

He released a filthy groan against your mouth when you reached down to wrap your fingers around his hard length through his underwear.

“ _ Careful...be careful, darling girl. I’m not in a mood to stay demure and restrained. I sincerely encourage you to continue if you wish for this whole building to hear our intimacy _ .”

“ _ Ezra….fuck, I want you. Please, I need to touch you _ .”

Ezra knocked his forehead against yours. You knew his eyes searched to catch yours in the darkness.

“ _ I need you to wait and be patient for me, sweetheart. When I take you next it will be in our own bed like you deserve _ .”

You leaned forward and bit his shoulder through his shirt. He gave a startled gasp before chuckling darkly. You groaned in frustration.

“ _ I need something, _ anything….. _ s’been so _ long…”

“ _ Lie down on your cot, Dove. Touch yourself for me. I want to hear how slick you are as you get yourself off to the thought of me buried inside your sweet little cunt. Touch yourself, and I will do the same. Let us fall apart for one another until I can express my desires to you properly _ .”

You barely hesitated before moving off his hospital cot to remove your shorts with shaking hands. No sooner were they discarded than you were splayed on your back on your cot, legs spread wide, wanton. You heard rustling from Ezra’s cot as he maneuvered his shorts down to free his cock. You heard the rhythmic, wet sounds as he began stroking himself in earnest.

You moaned when your fingers dipped down to your entrance, marvelling at how soaked your slit was. Scooping your arousal with two fingers, you began to circle your hard, aching clit. The wet, sinful sounds of your aroused core reverberated through the room as your fingers circled, pressed. Your breath hitched, your hips arched off of the cot and thrust of their own accord. You both moaned and gasped into the still air.

You could hear Ezra’s cot creaking. He was mumbling half- sentences, pausing to whimper and you could hear him stroking faster. You pictured his hips cana was as ting up as he fisted himself.

“ _ Fuuuuuuuck. Fuck I’m so close. Can you hear me Ezra? I need you to hear what you’re doing to me _ .”

“ _ Divine cunt. Mine….I can smell it. Smell you….. Holy shit. Holy shit. Holyshit _ …”

He stilled, screaming lowly as he reached his end. Gasping, breath hitching.

The fingers of your other hand pushed themselves into your passage as your other hand, still circling your clit, began fast, rough. The rhythm of your hips faulted as your orgasm suddenly slammed into you. You bit your lip so hard you may have drawn blood. You gasped and groaned as you felt your cum spill out of your seizing hole and coat your hand.

“ _ Ohhhhh.. Oh fuck. Oh fuck _ …….” Your breaths melted into whimpers as your hips slowed their twitching. Finally spent, you yawned deeply and turned on your side to face Ezra.

“Still not the same,” you whispered up into the outline of his face. “But if we ever do this again, I want to see you.”

***

You got to the hospital as early as you possibly could on the morning of Ezra’s discharge. You had helped him pack what meager belongings he had the evening before to bring to your apartment. You’d cleaned every surface furiously, and adorned your balcony and interior surfaces with wildflowers and vining greenery you’d purchased from a local nursery.

You brought with you new clothing, something comfortable and casual for him to wear, as well as a pair of loafers lined with fleece. You did not know what he preferred to wear; as well as you knew him, you’d never really seen one another in anything other than threadbare sweats or protective suits. You smiled to yourself as you thought of Ezra being able to buy himself nice clothing, of purchasing music he’d talked to you about for hours on the Green. Large, glossy hardcover books whose spines cracked when you opened them for the first time.

You knew you still had a lot of firsts coming with Ezra. You walked into the bustling lobby and quickly found his room. Ezra was pacing back and forth, muttering under his breath. When you entered he’d immediately stopped and came to you with a wide, beautiful smile.

“I have dreamt of this day for countless stands, sweet love,” he crooned as he wound his arms around you, crushing you to his chest. “My feet will deign not touch the earth in my haste…”

“Slow down a bit, Ez. I brought you some clothing...I hope you don’t hate them.”

He gazed down and you saw how his eyes shone in the early morning light. You loved him so much that your chest ached.

“I could never hate a single thing that passes from your hands to mine, Dove. They are perfect, as are you.” He craned his head down to ghost a kiss across your parted lips. It was chaste, soft and brief, yet you still felt the jolt settling low in your belly, growing warm and tight. You had not forgotten his promise to you during that one desperate night.

Ezra changed quickly as you waited. There was no need to excuse yourself- you’d both been through too much to be bashful. When he’d finished, he stood before you grinning with hands on his hips.

“How do I look, Dovie?”

“Like an angel.”

***

You could tell that Ezra was overwhelmed by the bustling streets of Central. His head whipping around, unsure of what to focus on. Eyes darting, mouth set in a line. You’d grabbed his hand and led the way through undulating throngs of bodies that squeezed, nudged, jostled. Your heart ached with sympathy as you recalled the chaos of your own first experience. You knew he needed time, as you had.

You wasted no time when you arrived at your brownstone building, briefly greeting the doorman on your way through the lobby. Confusion crossed Ezra’s face as he took in lush carpeting and the ivy that wound itself up an exposed brick wall.

“Pray tell, who was that man at the door, Dove?”

You giggled, pressing the button on the elevator. “That is Brice. He’s the doorman, he’s very nice.”

His eyes were wide. “We have a  _ doorman _ ?”

“I know, crazy, right?”

You entered the elevator. As the door whooshed closed you noted apprehension on Ezra’s face. You reached out to squeeze his hand reassuringly, and his features smoothed once more when he caught your small smile.

Soon enough you were at your door. You turned to Ezra and handed him a thick metal keycard.

“This is yours. Try it.”

He paused only momentarily before swiping the card. He reached out to the door handle, holding his breath. You bounced on your heels like a child, pushing him forward.

For one of the few times in all the days you’ve known Ezra, he was speechless. He roamed slowly through the wide open foyer, basking in the natural light streaming through the windows. He reached out a hand to gingerly caress a granite countertop. He caught site of the doors to your balcony and stood before them, hands hanging motionless at his sides.

You sidled up next to him, winding your arm through his.

“Do you like it, Ezra?” you asked softly, looking out over the city beside him.

Ezra turned to you, holding your eyes steadily. His hands moved down to grasp yours.

“I could never have imagined something so grand. This hardly feels real. Truthfully, I am unsure that I did not perish on the Green…” His hands moved up your arms to cradle your face. He leaned in slowly, exhaling into the cup of your ear.

“Show me our bedroom, Dove. It’s been long enough.”

You grabbed his hand, pulling him behind you down the hallway. He reached out to grasp your shirt as you stumbled and bumped into walls, desperate to feel you. You assisted him as best you could, and when you entered a room easily four times the size of your former tent, you heard his gasp.

You had spent an especially long time considering what you had wanted in a bed. It had been far too long since you’d had a proper bed, and so you spared no expense in finding the softest mattress, the sturdiest headboard. Your bed extended down an expanse of wall, covered by soft, downy blankets and piled with pillows.

“It’s...magnificent,” he murmured, reaching down to run his hand across the silken texture of the coverings. His hand moved up to hastily push aside the pillows and pull down the blankets. He hastily disrobed, shoving his shirt up while you joined him in freeing him from his pants. You divested yourself of your own and he caught your lips in a desperate kiss as he tumbled you backward onto the bed. You rolled him onto his back and straddled him, grinding your hips against his hard, swollen length. Ezra was moaning loudly, straining up to maintain contact. Between the sinfully soft blankets and mattress at his back and the heat from your cunt as you spread your arousal on the throbbing skin of his cock. You leaned forward to capture his lips, your hands restlessly moving over his shoulders.

“My beautiful man,” you crooned. “This is what we deserve. You are worthy of this. I need you.”

“Then take me. Ride me, sweet girl. Bless and baptize my cock with your heavenly slick.”

You positioned your dripping core over his head. You sank down slowly, feeling his thickness stretching you open, breaking you. You could not hold back the low moan bursting out of you as his cock reached the end of you. You stilled, after so long you had to allow yourself a moment to adjust to his size. You panted in low groans as your walls twitched and fluttered around Ezra’s incredible length.

Ezra gazed up at you reverently, biting his lip. He whimpered when your cunt squeezed him, hands reaching out to fasten on your hips.

“Fuck…. _ f-fuck _ , sweatheart. Forgot how  _ fucking perfect _ you feel. Sweet Kevva. Use me, sweet girl...take what you need.”

You drew yourself up until he was almost out of you, keeping his head trapped in your leaking hole. Without warning you slammed your hips down. The sound that left Ezra’s mouth was feral, animalistic. You began a steady pace of lifting and dropping, eventually falling forward onto Ezra’s chest. You started babbling in between your desperate whimpers and sobs. He hit that one spot inside you in this position, you quickly discovered. It made you roll your eyes back in ecstasy, mouth hanging open between bursts of speech.

“Hngh….oh...my... _ fucking Gods _ , so good, you feel so  _ good how is this soo goooood _ …”

Ezra met your gaze with his eyes wild, teeth gritted. He threw his head back, his hands gripping your hips as he urged you to move faster, harder, while he spoke out into the air in a broken, shaking prayer.

“So good for me, please come for me.  _ Come on my cock _ , sweet Dove, mark me,  _ soak me _ before I paint this fucking perfect cunt…”

You were covered in a sheen of sweat, movements faltering from the sustained effort of using him the way you needed. Sensing this, Ezra wrapped his arms around you and crushed your chest to his. Shifting under you, he began to piston himself into your slick, hot sex as your cries became sharp and loud. You lost the power of speech as your breath left your body in explosive gushes against the side of his straining neck. You came with a strangled scream, Ezra struggling to keep you atop him as your limbs shook and bucked of their own accord. You dimly felt the gush of your come running out of you to soak his swollen cock

“ _ That’s iiitt _ , let it happen, so good for me, taking your pleasure with me  _ so…..deep _ ….insideyou _ SHIT _ ….” He stilled as his own orgasm crashed around the both of you, head back and groaning loud enough that his voice rattled your soul, your racing heart beating a staccato beat within your chest. You worked through your highs, your bucking hips and shaking legs slowing down incrementally. Your breath eventually slowed, and you stayed nestled against his neck as he, too, came back to himself.

You stayed like that, with him softening inside of you, as he reached down to cover you both with a blanket. You felt limbless, untethered, so mortally sated that you did not care if the world around you was burning to the ground. You barely felt the ghost of Ezra’s lips on your forehead as you drifted out of consciousness. One word, repeated through the haze of dwindling thought was your anchor to everything around you that you had killed and bled and cried for, unbelievably real and soft and unflinchingly  _ kind _ . 

_ Home _ .

  
  



	10. Part Ten

_ Waxing Gibbous  _

_ Pairing: Ezra + femNurse! Reader _

_ Rating: Hard M / 18+ ONLY _

_ * Warnings: ANGST/ mentions of depression/ anxiety/ sleep paralysis/ Tooth- rotting Comfort it’s disgusting. _

_ * Summary: Ezra’s demons come to the surface. _

_ * Word Count: ~1100 _

  
  


PART TEN

__ Your new lives together began as a languid chapter of existing slowly, of lazing like cats. You often stayed in your bed, at times going hours exchanging soft words and insistent touches. You stayed unclothed for days on end, only donning a robe to accept the occasional delivery. You drank wine and ate fruit and cheese and read to each other from the books you’d begun amassing. It was heaven, bacchanalian. 

Ezra would sometimes come up behind you at the kitchen counter and press against your back wordlessly, his arousal begging entry. You’d sigh, tilting your head back onto his shoulder as he slid home and made love to you lazily in the patch of sunlight that streamed through the glass to cut a warm diamond across the checkered French tile. You reveled in one another in such a way that each touch was a devotional, each kiss a promise. You had paid for your sins and for the violence of your past mistakes and bloodied intentions with pieces of your souls. What was left were holes you saw fit to fill with each other.

By the end of that first blissful week, you began entertaining how you would begin to reveal Central to Ezra. You had often walked past a small cafe that had an attached book store on your way to and from the hospital. It was small and intimate, and seemed tailor-made to entertain his whims. Two streets over you’d spied a tavern that seemed outfitted with copies of retro Earth-style advertisements and poorly taxidermied animals. You itched to walk in every time you passed it. After so much isolation, stress and heartache you were desperate to drink in any vestige of civilization, any morsel of culture you could find.

The first few times you’d brought up venturing out to Ezra, he’d been able to steer you easily with insistent kisses and roaming hands. 

“Why would we dream of leaving this heaven, that we have sweat and sacrificed and toiled over, for hours unending?” he’d said softly into your neck as his hand crept downward over the slope of your stomach.

Eventually in your growing restlessness you grabbed his hands as he once again attempted a seductive distraction and you squeezed them until the stream of words slowly died off on his clever tongue. You met his eyes.

“Ezra, why do you try to distract me when I bring up leaving the apartment?”

The corner of his mouth twisted upward, but the gesture did not reach his eyes.

“Sweet love, we have both been through tours of the realms of seven layers of hell. We have almost perished time and again and have committed our fair share of sins too inumerable to count. Please, do forgive me if I deign to want some modicum of comfort.”

“You can  _ have _ comfort, Ez, we can  _ both _ have it. But don’t you want to peak at what’s outside as well? Aren’t you just a bit curious for what wonders Central may hold?”

As you continued to speak, the mask slipped away from Ezra’s face. A deep crease of worry, of fatigue, formed between his heavy brows. His eyes became distant, focusing on some faraway and unknowable misery. You reached out to cup his face and turned his mournful gaze upon you.

“Talk to me, my love. Please don’t hide yourself away.”

Ezra took a shallow, shuddering breath before responding.

“I fear I may have lost myself down on that accursed moon, Dove. Where I was certain of so much, I now find myself questioning even the simplest machinations. I find such mundane things as choosing clothing or food to eat almost insurmountable when tasked with the quandary of completion. I’m having dreams at night of things I cannot recall, but I’ve begun to awaken paralyzed, with the weight of a succubus upon my chest. 

“It is a great humiliation to admit to you, dearest, that the thought of leaving this sanctuary, at present, is one that imbues me with an undue panic.” He was no longer meeting your eyes at this point, his gaze moving to focus on a vague point of focus somewhere past your shoulder.

You fought hard to swallow past the nefarious lump in your throat, lip trembling and vision blurring. You felt heartless. You had spent so much time reveling in every new and good comfort in your life that had stayed so foreign for so long that you had failed to notice Ezra’s pain. You were a selfish fool. You moved to turn away from him in shame.

Ezra did not let you. When he noticed your actions, his hand reached to grasp your shoulder. He turned you back to him. He enveloped you in his arms, releasing a steadying breath into your hair. He allowed you to weep against his shirt.

“ _ Ezra _ ,” you gasped into his chest. “.....please forgive me. I can’t believe I’ve been so blind.”

He held you against him as if trying to anchor you. He stroked your hair and the side of your face and murmured to you.

“Dove, you have been my one saving grace. If I am expressing this to you now it is only because you implore me to do so. I have tried valiantly to act as if everything were copacetic since I awoke in that soulless hospital room. Please do not torture yourself with blame when it does not belong to you.” 

“It kills me that I didn’t notice, Ezra. We’re supposed to be able to take care of each other.”

“You care for me better than any I’ve known in my long and wretched life, my dearest love. I have these demons through circumstances both within and beyond my control. If not for you I would be rendered truly wretched, unworthy of the lowliest glance from the dregs of the universe.”

Your hands framed his face, your tears slowing incrementally as his words flowed through you like pure rivulets of gentle intention. You kissed him so gently, so reverently, as if he were a secret thing only reserved for those beholden to the designs of the old gods. Forgotten and precious. Sacred and profane.

“My soul will always seek out yours, beautiful boy. I will do whatever it takes to help you through this. I will ask nothing from you, ever. If you want to stay here forever I will be by your side. There is truly nowhere else I’d rather be.”

Ezra’s voice hitched with emotion. He kissed over and over your eyelids, your nose, your cheeks, before settling his parted lips to the crook of your neck, where bore witness to the fluttering of your pulse beneath your skin.

“I will try, Dove. For you I will move planets. I will raze Kevva themselves to the ground and condemn myself to eternal damnation. For you, I will try.”


	11. Part Eleven

Waxing Gibbous   
Pairing: Ezra + femNurse! Reader  
Rating: Hard M / 18+ ONLY

* Warnings: Angst/ violence/ mention of blood/ SMUT/ PIV, fingering/ public sex/ slight exhibitionism  
* Summary: Ezra confronts his fears. A night out on Central does not go as planned.  
* Word Count: ~2600

PART ELEVEN

You learned quickly that when Ezra told you he was going to try, he tried. The very next day, he asked you to take him down to the lobby. You’d attempted to protest, but a facet of his personality you were getting more acquainted with over time was the man’s stubbornness.   
“Mama always told me I was more stubborn than a mule stuck in a mud puddle,” he’d rambled to you once.  
On this day, he said, “You know there’s no other way for me to do this except to get it done, Dove.”  
You moved to stand in front of him. You crossed your arms, head tilted to one side as you surveyed him before you. He looked determined, jaw working rhythmically. His hands hung loosely at his sides, but you noticed how he was clenching and unclenching his fists restlessly.  
“Ezra“, I don’t expect you to just waltz out of the apartment and seize the city like a lump of aurelac,” you reasoned. “I want to do this on your terms, and I don’t want you to feel in any way pressured. I feel like you think I’m expecting you to do this.”  
“Dove, you know that as decisive as I may be, one thing I am not is easily swayed or pressured. Trust that I feel no such thing from you, as it is my choice alone to foray out of this nest.”  
So, you had accompanied him cautiously onto the elevator, carefully watching and gauging his reactions to being confined within the claustrophobic reaches of the metal box you found yourselves encased in, ferrying you downward. Ezra’s tongue darted out to wet his lip nervously, you noticed his foot tapping against the carpet. You wondered if he noticed he was doing it.  
When the elevator reached its destination with a faint ping, you steeled yourself. You were ready for his impending meltdown, his shaking uncertainty, possibly his refusal to walk any further. Your eyes widened as you watched him stride determinedly out into the lobby. You trailed close behind, ready to reel him back in if he became overwhelmed. You thought that he’d pause a moment, reacquaint himself with the lobby itself before venturing further, but he strode bullishly toward where Brice was standing near the front doorway.  
“If you’ll excuse me, my good man,” Ezra muttered through the grim set of his mouth. He did not pause, he did not hesitate. He gave Brice no opportunity to hold the door open for him. He grasped the handle himself and thrust himself out onto a bustling street.  
You were right behind him, your brows drawn with concern. You reached out to grasp his hand.  
“Ezra?”  
His shoulders squared, he turned to face you. He was breathing heavily, his eyes moving in disjointed stutters as if he was trying to download and process everything at once to a file in his brain.  
“Ezra, take a deep breath.”  
His eyes finally settled on you, dark pools of intensity. He did as you asked. His shoulders dropped to their natural position. Your other hand joined your first, clasping his large hands in yours. People continued past you on their way to their lovers and jobs and homes and they parted like a sea around the both of you as his gaze held you, hypnotic and deep. His hands pulled from your grasp and he crushed himself to you, his mouth finding yours in a dizzying kiss. Breathless, desperate, the rest of the world disappeared.  
“I did it, sweet love,” he whispered against your mouth. You did not heed the noise and push of the city thrumming around you, the entire street ceased and froze as if the universe was swallowing its own stars and they reappeared, rebirthed and glittering, in the encompassing weight of Ezra’s eyes upon you.  
“All manner of things in this world are limitless and surmountable, survivable, when I have you by my side.”

******

One week later you found yourself in a dive bar that ended up being approximately twenty minutes from your loft. You had worked incrementally each day, walking with Ezra as he ventured further and then a bit further. You saw his confidence begin to return. You had sat one morning at a small table on the sidewalk of a cafe, reading Keats to one another as you sipped cappuccino. Ezra made sly remarks about the goings-on of passing strangers, weaving threads of supposition according to what he thought of what they wore, how quickly they were walking, who they were with. His eyes were lively. He reminded you of the person he’d been at his table in his tent on the Green: head thrown back, joyous.  
You were finally knowing him like this.  
And so, you sat in the crowded bar, smelling the cologne and sweat and smoke enveloping you and those around you. You had felt nervous entering, a sudden impulse to look for the nearest exit slammed into you. A patron sidled past you, bumping your shoulder. You jumped, your heart hammering. You tried desperately to quell what seemed to be an oncoming panic attack- there were too many people, it was so, so loud and anyone could just reach out and grab you, slam you into-  
“Dovie.”  
Your frenzied reverie was interrupted by Ezra’s warm hand on the small of your back as he guided you to a table in a corner. His breath tickled the hair that curled around your ear as he spoke close and low.  
“Sit here, see? Your back will be against the wall. You can see everyone this way. You are safe with me, sweet one.”  
With his voice close, grounding you, you took deep unsteady breaths until you felt your heart rate begin to slow. You reassured him as the bartender approached you. You decided that alcohol may not be a bad idea, for either of you, in helping you relax. You ordered a gin and tonic with lime, Ezra requested an extra dirty vodka martini. While you waited for your drinks you took in the humid press of bodies gyrating on a makeshift dance floor, you absorbed the loose, languid movements of the inebriated patrons before you. Could you do such a thing, would you ever be capable of such abandon again in a place like this?  
Your drinks were set in front of you. Ezra reached for his and took a long sip, his eyes closing with a soft groan.  
“I cannot begin to tell you how long it’s been since I’ve imbibed such high-brow spirits in what amounts to a dusty hovel.”  
You sipped your own drink, the burn sliding down your throat blooming into warmth when it hit your belly. Your brain quickly began to feel fuzzy, your limbs loose and warm. It had been stands since you’d had anything stronger than wine. You set your glass down and turned to see Ezra staring at you, his own cheeks pinking from the effects of his drink. He leaned his head to the side, one hand reaching for your bare knee, at the same time the sudden crack of a pool cue across the room made you jump, an arm shooting out in unconscious self-defense as your hand connected with your glass. Ezra’s own hand reflexively moved to catch the glass before it could topple and shatter, but not before the contents sloshed over the edge to soak down the front of your new dress.  
“Kevva-damned. Shit….This is the first time I’ve even worn this!”  
Ezra was unperturbed, smiling gently as he squeezed your knee.  
“I’m sure it will come out in the wash, love, I’ll leave you only briefly to procure you proper cleaning implements. Do not trouble yourself.”  
You sighed, nodding gratefully. You watched as Ezra stood up and made his way to the bar. It was crowded indeed tonight, and you noted that there were quite a few people in line ahead of him. You sighed again, looking down at your front. You wrinkled your nose; you smelled like a distillery.  
Klutz.  
Lost in your thoughts, it took you a moment in your blunted state to notice that another drink was slid in front of you as the chair beside you scraped back from the table. A man sat down next to you, grinning crookedly. He leaned forward before speaking.  
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in here before. Sorry about the drink, I thought maybe you could use a replacement.”  
His hair was flame-colored, unnaturally so. His nose, eyebrows and ears were heavily pierced, and his arms were covered in tattoos. In another lifetime, perhaps, you may have welcomed his advances. Tonight, however, you glanced around frantically for Ezra. You felt suddenly exposed, like a lame rabbit trapped in a dog pen.  
“I…..I’m not alone, you know. I’m here with someone. So, no thank you. On the drink.”  
The man’s brows shot up in surprise. “Oh! I didn’t mean….sorry. I saw you spill your drink, and then I saw your friend get up...I was getting my own drink, I figured you could use another one as well.”  
You swallowed down your panic, your hand twitching in your lap.  
If only I had a thrower.  
“You were watching me?”  
“Relax. I was just trying to be nice!”  
“What did you put in this drink, anyway? Sedative? Some kind of amatory agent?”  
“I don’t know what you-”  
The man choked on the rest of his words as he was yanked out of the chair roughly by the back of his shirt. He was slammed up against the wall, Ezra’s fingers wrapped around the man’s throat.  
“I do believe the lady would like to be left alone,” he hissed darkly, jaw clenched. His head was lowered, eyes blackened pools of rage. His voice wavered on a razor-thin edge of control. The interloping man’s eyes were wide, it appeared that he was gasping for breath as Ezra’s knuckles turned white. You noticed the knife in Ezra’s hand. You had the far away realization that he must have been keeping it in his boot, the same way he had on the Green.  
He had carried it all this time.  
Ezra brought the tip of his knife to a slot of pulsing skin between his fingertips. The blade pressed in, a bead of blood pricking forth as the man gasped. A dark spot spread on the front of the man’s pants.  
“Do you know how quickly a man bleeds out if cut in just the right way? I do, I know from experience. Do you also know how to make things last, how to prolong one’s mortal agony until they plead for the sweet embrace of oblivion? I know that too.”   
You were monsters, you realized with a sudden, shocking clarity. You were not fit for civilization. Ezra was a hair's-breadth from murdering a stranger in a public place while you watched impassively. This is who you have become. This is what the moon had done to you.  
Without thinking, you jumped up from the table. Your hand grasped Ezra’s shoulder.  
“EZRA.” your voice was clear, sobered, authoritative. “Stop. Come back.”  
Ezra almost shook his head as he looked at his hand, holding the knife as if it belonged to someone else. He let the man go, and the man slid down the wall to crumple onto the ground.  
You realized it was silent- everyone in the bar was staring.  
You grabbed onto his hand in a vise-like grip and moved to the door.  
“We’re leaving. NOW.”  
There was a sea of shocked silence that parted around you. You did not hesitate, you did not stop to take in the widened eyes, the slack jaws. You walked until you were both out in the cool air of the warm night.  
You kept your eyes forward with a tight grip on Ezra’s hand.  
Get away, you repeated in your mind like a mantra. Get away, get away, get away…  
You squeaked out a wordless exclamation when Ezra halted, pulling you backward into a narrow side alley. He spun you to face the cool brick wall, caging you with his hands and hips. He pressed up against you insistently, panting as if he’d been sprinting.  
“Ez-” your words were cut off as his lips crushed onto yours, rough and messy. His hands grasped at the hem of your dress, raking it up around your waist. He ripped your underwear down past the curve of your ass with trembling fingers. You gasped when his fingers entered you, rough and sudden.  
“Ezra, we’re in an alley, someone could walk byyyy…” your last words dissolved in a whine as he angled his fingers, expertly curled, and hit that spot inside- the place he knew you needed him most.  
Hot plosives of air against your ear, you felt fully enveloped by Ezra and completely exposed to everything else. He withdrew his fingers suddenly and frantically went to unfasten his pants.  
“I need you,” he rasped, his voice desperate and shuddering. “I need to come back to myself. Remind myself. Please. I need to know you are mine. Show me.”  
You felt the blunt head of him notched at your entrance. Grasping his cock in his fist, he spread your leaking arousal to mix with the precum dripping from his own slit before sliding into you with a single thrust. His hips met yours as you brought your fist to your mouth, biting down to keep from screaming. Ezra withdrew almost completely, still trembling, and slammed back into you. Your breasts were mashed against the rough wall, you had to use both hands to brace yourself against the onslaught of his thrusts. One of his hands went up to your mouth and covered it firmly; his other hand reached between your legs to circle your clit roughly.  
He fucked up into you with abandon, without regard for his surroundings and despite the possibility of being caught. He kept his voice low, gasping and whining as his punishing rhythm had you quickly hurtling toward your own release.  
“Mine….mine,” he groaned into your ear, slapping sounds from your desperate union echoing in the air of the alleyway. “Going to fuck you like this in every corner of Central, on every surface. Claim this pussy over and over again. Take you apart.”  
His words against your sweat-slicked skin, his hot breath, his fingers on your clit, his brutal thrusts all melded into the sin of him taking your like this, claiming you in the open. You release slammed into you, unexpected, overwhelming. You bit the inside of his hand, breaths harsh, ragged, keening. You sobbed wordlessly against him as he stilled, spilling into you as he cried out. The intensity and strength of his orgasm had rendered him incapable of remaining quiet. Your legs shook, Ezra’s arms wrapping firmly around your waist to keep you from collapsing to the dirty concrete.  
When your hammering heart had finally slowed and your breathing finally evened out, Ezra reverently helped you back to some semblance of presentability before you made your way back to your apartment, still shaky and somewhat lightheaded.  
Once back in the safety of your shared home you sighed deeply before wrapping your arms around Ezra’s waist. You knew you both had quite a bit more to work through than you’d originally thought, but Kevva knew there was no one else for you. You gazed up at him with a small, sad smile.  
“We can’t go back to that bar, Ezra.”  
“I know, Dove.”


	12. Part Twelve

Waxing Gibbous   
Pairing: Ezra + femNurse! Reader  
Rating: Hard M / 18+ ONLY

* Warnings: ANGST/ mentions of depression/ perceived death/ claustrophobia/ graphic descriptions of injury/ gore/ live burial/ nightmares/ guilt/ fear/ paralysis/ pain/ despair  
* Summary: You can only keep it down so long.  
* Word Count: ~900

This chapter contains some content that some may find triggering- please see the warnings above. I deal with my feelings through writing as a way to acknowledge and process what I’m feeling. It is therapeutic for me. That said, PLEASE do not read this chapter if you feel down and find that reading about the topics above may make you feel worse. I promise the story still makes sense if you sit this one out.  
I wrote this because I needed to be selfish and work through some dark thoughts. It is absolutely and completely self-indulgent and I hesitated to even post it. I recognize that these are dark times for so many of us, please know that I love and cherish every single one of you and I will ALWAYS welcome discourse with anyone who needs encouragement, commiseration, or a sympathetic ear.

PART TWELVE

You had your first nightmare the night following the incident at the bar. You were unsure if the actual confrontation had triggered you, or if it was simply the proverbial last straw among the amalgam of stress and circumstance, but you’d awoken screaming and slicked with sweat.  
In your dream you were dead. Your limbs were frozen and stiff. Your eyes did not open. Though you had expired, you were still able to hear what was said around you as if underwater. You were still within your own body, muffled and broken. The voices around you spoke of how you died. You had fallen from a great height, you could feel the sickly pull of gravity winding its fist into your guts as you hurtled toward the ground. You felt everything, the snap of your limbs shattering like glass. Shards of bone lanced your organs, your sight sparked and pulsed as your retinas detached before your vision turned red and then black. Your throat choked with blood. You were panicking. You could not move, you could not scream. Your pain was transcendental in it’s exquisite clarity.  
You willed yourself to lose consciousness. You prayed for your end as the agony of countless fathoms of searing stilettos cut into you and pulled their pound of flesh gleefully from your broken body.  
This is what was due for you. This is what you deserved for killing, for hurting.  
You gasped in your misery in place of your breath. You leaned into the pain, wanted it. You would suffer. You were unsure if there were tears sliding down your face. You felt wet all around. Tears or blood, leaking out of you in equal measure.  
You felt your world tilting and sliding. Movement. Every sensation re-breaking you, reminding you to pay attention. You were not going anywhere, you would bear witness to your slow and torturous end, you would learn that this was your world, at the mercy of countless faceless masters filled with infinite patience.  
You were placed in a box. That box was sealed. You heard the muffled pounding of nails into splintering wood. There was no way to save you.  
Clods of earth rained upon the box. You lie impassive, frozen. Resigned and terrified.  
Thwump.  
Every action you had taken part in, every injury and injustice and I’ll-gotten reward outweighed any halfhearted effort of goodwill you’d extended during your short and brutal life.  
Pathetic.  
Thwump.  
Worthless.  
Thwump.  
You were dead, and you had not ascended to some alternate universe, some abstract heavenly reward. In a box, in a broken body you felt every agonal sensation, your eyes unseeing and unblinking. Your brain screaming, pleading from some distant, flawed and human place to release you. You felt the cold, robotic legs of countless pale and sightless insects. They were crawling into your pants. Into your hair. Your mouth. Scrabbling against your grey gums and your powdery tongue.  
You felt the first searching pinches of mandibles against your cool and tender flesh.

****

You were screaming, your voice raw. Keening. You couldn’t see. Your limbs thrashed against bindings that held you, horizontal and utterly helpless as your hoarse voice dissolved into rasping sobs. Your brain was slow to register your actions as your desperation and terror made you feel as if your heart was going to crack through your sternum with the force of its hammering.   
But it shouldn’t be beating.  
You were dead and in a box in the ground, paralyzed and in agony and covered in gnawing insects.  
Strong arms grasped you, holding you still. You struggled against the hold violently. You kicked out against something, anything.  
The arms wrapped around you tightly. Mouth against your neck, speaking lowly.  
“I’m right here. Wake up, love. I’ve got you, I’ve got you.”  
The voice, disembodied in the darkness, continued to reassure and sooth patiently as your hitching breaths and sobs gradually abated.  
Ezra had you, and he stroked your back, your hair, your forehead, your arms as he murmured.  
“It seems that your mind has finally caught up with our sordid histories and nefarious goings-on, my sweet love. My own terrified cries have been known to propel me from restless slumber in the oppressive darkness of night.”  
You slumped against him, wrung out, exhausted. You slowly came to realize that you had not been able to move your limbs fully because they had tangled in the sheets as you’d thrashed. You had screamed so long and loud that your voice croaked when you could finally speak.  
“I have never dreamt like that Ezra. I was dead, but I was trapped in my body. I was dead, but I could feel everything. They put me in a box and buried me. It felt real.”  
“The horrors we’ve faced, the things we’ve done, will manifest in any number of nefarious ways, Dove. It is but a product of our shared experience.”  
You stood up on shaking legs and began to turn on every light in the room. You came back to the bed and cocooned yourself in as many blankets as you could find. Ezra drew you to him, leaning your back against his chest as you sat on the mattress between his legs. He notched his chin onto your shoulder and sighed. He stayed silent, waiting for you to speak or not speak.  
You did not speak.


	13. Part Thirteen

Waxing Gibbous   
Pairing: Ezra + femNurse! Reader  
Rating: Hard M / 18+ ONLY

* Warnings: Angst/ mentions of childhood trauma/ mention of domestic abuse, violence/ killing both in- and unintentional/ SMUT/ hand job/ fingering/ mentions of partner-sharing, threesomes/ PTSD/ nightmares  
* Summary: Confessions of sin and of desires.  
* Word Count: ~2200

PART THIRTEEN

The weather on Central turned cool as the months stretched on. You’d realized after the bar that you had perhaps pushed too far, too soon. You’d both retreated back to the sanctuary of your home to regroup. The insidious nightmares continued for you, though nowhere near the level of intensity of the first. You continued to sleep with the lights on, limbs entangled with Ezra’s. You held on to one another, fingers drifting over pulse points, entwining fingers and legs. Two halves of some damaged whole.  
You’d found some solace in cooking. You had gone so long without anything more than the nutritionally dense, yet bland and uninspired nutribars and ration packs that you were desperate to experiment. It was slow going at first, but Ezra was far from selective with what he’d eat. He devoured everything you put in front of him, even burnt and strangely seasoned. He offered profuse compliments that expounded upon his good fortune in having found someone so willing to graciously cook for him. It always made you snort, but you appreciated the fact that he was supportive.  
Ezra had begun writing an autobiography of sorts. You often heard his dictation well into the stretch of your afternoons, his voice animating into flights of vivid imagery and florid, expounding descriptions. He dictated, but he also typed, pecking with the pointer fingers of each hand. You knew that when he was typing he was not to be disturbed. He never said it outright, but you knew that he typed because he could not bring to life the horrors he’d both witnessed and committed, he could not convince himself to speak of things he’d done that would shake the foundations of a kinder man’s moral compass.  
You were not privy to those thoughts. You stayed away, you respected his need to keep that part of him tucked away. You knew it was his way of working through it, of processing the deeds that had led him to what seemed in the reaches of his mind to be an unearned reward. He would tell you in his own time, you did not press or push him as you knew better than most how fragile peace of mind could be. You would allow him any indulgence that may work to keep the dreams away.  
When Ezra had a nightmare, you were most often awoken by a keening whine between clenching teeth. He did not thrash as you did, rather he’d lie beside you as if paralyzed. You had to talk to him to bring him back, coaxing his rigid muscles to loosen with careful, even strokes of your palms across his limbs and torso.   
“Come back to me, love. You’re not back there. You’re here with me.”  
He would reemerge from his fathomless depths gasping, and reach out to you, winding his limbs through yours as a thistle seeks to weave itself into the wind that caresses it.  
You moved your hand to his chest, felt the frantic pounding beneath his breast. Like a trapped bird desperate to escape. You smoothed your fingers across the expanse of his bare chest, his skin warm and alive, thrumming. Present. And then lower, rubbed against the soft curve of his belly as its panicked heaving incrementally slowed.  
Lower still to the soft curls beneath his navel. Your fingers wove through the hair, teasing the skin with your nails. Ezra huffed, eyes fluttering. He turned his head toward you, knocking his forehead against yours.  
“My Dove….the succubi had their talons hooked into my tattered soul once again, I’m afraid.”  
You leaned forward and kissed him softly. His hitching exhale made its home within your mouth.  
“Is there nothing I can do to take this away, Ezra? Nothing I can offer you that will soothe you?”  
Your finger dipped down, lightly tracing the curve of his half-hard cock. You felt it twitch, followed by Ezra’s sharp intake of breath.  
“The demons that consume the nether regions of my addled mind cannot be placated so easily, Dove. The things I have done, the wretched life I’ve lived would leave you without thought of staying. My greatest fear is your discovering the nefarious deeds of my past, of learning exactly who it is that you lie willingly next to in this bed.”  
“I know who I lie next to, Ezra. I lie next to a man who decided to trust me, who gave me my voice back and showed me that I am worthy of love. That will never change. No matter what sins you’ve committed, I can stop loving you no more than I can keep the moon from waxing and waning.” Your hand encircled his length, rubbing gently. You trailed kisses across his shoulder as he gasped. He reached a hand to cover yours, stilling your actions momentarily. He paused for what seemed an impossibly long beat, seeming to consider his next words to you.  
“When I was a child in Louisiana we were poor. Mama worked three jobs to keep food on the table and a roof over our heads. My father was a drunk, shiftless sonofabitch. He put his hands on Mama and on me and Isaiah like clockwork when his life did not go his way. It did not go his way often. One night, he was really workin’ Mama over something awful. Isaiah was out in the shed fiddlin’ with an old transistor we found earlier that day at the salvage yard. I was alone in the house and Father had his hands around Mama’s neck.  
“She was strugglin’ and kicking at his knees, wherever she could reach, but Father wouldn’t stop. When he maneuvered close enough to the root cellar I saw my chance. I ran and I screamed, as loud as I could, and I shoved up against Father with all of the force I could muster. A meager show, to be sure, but Father was well on his way to obliterated by that time. He was just unsteady enough on his feet to topple forward down the steps. I heard his neck snap like a twig and he was dead before he hit the dirt. Mama and I told Isaiah it was an accident. But the truth is, Dovie, I took a life for the first time when I was nine years old.”  
Your hand raised from his groin to cup his cheek, your throat constricting around the lump forming there.  
“You were just a little boy, Ezra, scared for his Mama. You were protecting her. He may have killed her that day, if not for you.”  
His eyes narrowed, his voice thick with emotion. “That day set my path. I knew that I was not fortunate. I hated that I didn’t have what others were so freely given. I was born under a bad star, under an awning of misfortune. I was determined from that day forward to do whatever it took to survive. Kill, maim, steal. I have sold my soul a million times over to ensure my own victory in all my ensuing endeavors.”  
When he paused to collect his thoughts further, your hand drifted back down to his groin. He was now fully erect, and you felt the precum beading at the tip of his cock. He was hot, unbelievably so, and his eyes squeezed shut with a low groan as you swept your thumb through the slick of his crown. His head tipped back into his pillow. He resumed his confessions with a straining voice.  
“Later on, when Isaiah and I began prospecting as a means of finding our fortunes, we often found ourselves on the wrong end of an underhanded deal. We were green, and we were easy marks. We were swindled, robbed and double-crossed more than I care to admit, Dove. It took me a fair amount of time to become just as ruthless as those who would venture to hoodwink myself and my partner. The first time I killed on a job, it was a woman who thought she could bewitch and seduce me. Isaiah had overheard her plans with her partner to satiate my carnal desires before making off with my haul in the dead of night. I saw the knife in her hand as she tried her best to take my cock down her throat. I wrested it from her and used it to penetrate her chest. The third intercostal space of the ribcage houses an anatomical landmark known as Erb’s Point. Her own weapon found its home at the apex of her heart, and she bled out summarily.”  
His breathing was becoming more shallow, his exhales more explosive as you continued to stroke him as he spoke, reaching every so often lower still to cup and gently roll his balls, which were steadily drawing themselves up, tightening against his tensing body. He canted his hips up into the air as you worked him. He rasped out a stuttering groan and panted up into the ceiling before whipping his head toward you, turning his body onto its side in the bed beside yours.  
“You know by now….”  
(gasp)  
“Isaiah was stabbed and left to die in an alley. It was the work of that woman’s partner. While I…”  
(groan)  
“While a did heartily mourn the loss of my only sibling, I could not….Kevva, girl….I could not begrudge him his need for karmic justice.”  
You brought your palm to your mouth, licked a wide, lascivious stripe from the base of your palm to the tips of your fingers. Ezra’s hand found your hip and squeezed. His eyes were dark, lust-filled and far away. He was lost in his reverie while consumed with your ministrations.  
“Keep going, sweetheart,” you soothed to him, nipping at the junction of his neck and shoulder. “I’ll take it from you. Don’t hold it back..”  
He answered with a full-body shudder, teeth catching his lip. He swelled and twitched and leaked into your eager hand; you knew he was close. He canted his lips to the cusp of your ear, breath hitching, stirring the hair there like chaffs of wheat in summer wind.  
“I found...myself alone and so I was available to partner up with whomever I could find that I deemed beneficial on my various excursions. I...fuck, I….found myself attached to a most open arrangement related to a job I signed up for on the Pug. A married couple, male and female. They….they both took a shine to my proselytizing, indeed they each became in short order equally enamored with...other more physical aspects of my prowesssweetmother….”  
His canting hips began an erratic stutter as your hand squeezed and stroked and twisted around his turgid cock. Your own breath became thick and shallow, a pool of arousal collecting at your center that you soon felt drooling onto the flesh of your inner thighs. You nipped at his jawline as his eyes fluttered shut, eyebrows knit together, mouth open as he embraced the divine sensations you were giving him.  
“Ezra….” you moaned against him. “Ezra, did you fuck them? Tell me how you fucked them…”  
“Always….shit….always together. That was the agreement. His cock in my mouth, her mouth on my cock… oh my gods sweetheart I’m close….he’d eat her pussy while I fucked his tight ass….she...fuck meee...she loved a hard cock in her cunt and in her ass at the same tiiiimme…..oh Jesus Dove FUCK.”  
His hips thrust and stuttered, his balls drawn taut and tight as he spilled into your hand. He buried his face in your neck and moaned, whimpered, as his seed came forth hot and thick to paint your palm and fingers.  
When he finally stilled, you brought the mess he’d made to your lips and made a show of licking every finger before lapping at your palm to clean it thoroughly.  
Ezra’s fingers found themselves parting your soaked, swollen folds as you gasped against his mouth, your tongue licking in to caress his teeth, to tangle with the slick velvet of his own talented instrument.  
“I want that, Ezra,” you groaned against his hot mouth. “I want that with you...I want you to watch me while I lick a cunt. I want to gag on someone else’s cock for you. Perform for you. I want to watch you get fucked in that beautiful ass….” you keened as two of his fingers entered your twitching, weeping hole. Ezra watched your face, eyes wide and mouth open, as he processed the frantic, lust-soaked words that spilled from your lips unabashed in their filth.  
“Is that what you desire my love? To explore the whims of the Satyr, to share the pleasure of other willing bodies with one another?”  
“Fuck yes, Ezra…” you sobbed against his flexing bicep as his fingers and palm worked you toward your own rapid petit mort.  
“Kevva wept, Dove, then you shall have it.”


	14. Part Fourteen

Waxing Gibbous   
Pairing: Ezra + femNurse! Reader  
Rating: Hard M / 18+ ONLY

* Warnings: Angst, violence, SMUT/ threesome mmf/ fingering/ oral (m/f, f/f), assault, PTSD, Very Dark Thoughts  
* Summary: Negotiation, implementation, consternation, consequences  
* Word Count: ~2500k

PART FOURTEEN

You tread your new dynamic with care and consideration. Ezra asked you, again and again, if you were sure. He knew people got jealous, no matter how open they may seem to experimentation at the outset. Ezra has been around, of that he’s made no qualms of reminding you. He’d seen arrangements blown up in both the heat of passion and in the dry planning stages. He professed to you in a million different ways that he would sooner lose a limb than jeopardize your partnership.  
“If this is to have even a whisper of eventual occurrence, Dovie, the channels of communication must remain patent and our exchanges honest. There must be not one shred of doubt and uncertainty. I have seen the strongest of unions crumble to dust through the mismanaged impropriety of baser desires.”  
His eyes were warm, yet somber. The uptick at the corner of his mouth belied the serious set of his features. You knew he had concerns. His hands grasped yours, your knees canted toward one another as you sat on your couch.  
You trusted him implicitly. You had never been in a situation such as the hypothetical you were now navigating. Your past dalliances had not lacked variety, however they had not been frequent. Indeed, before Ezra you had been without physical intimacy for well over two years.   
From the beginning, you had discussed ground rules. Ezra relayed and reinforced to you, during each careful conversation, that you must be in agreement with one another for every step of this new equation.   
“I will ask you ad nauseum for your explicit consent in all doings, Dove,” his hand caught your wrist and stroked a broad thumb over your pulse point. “We must ask the same of whomever we entwine ourselves with. It truly is the crux of all pleasure, of the give and take of Eros. To know that what all parties deign to both imbibe and impart is agreed upon and accepted.”  
“I understand, Ez.”  
Perhaps at least as important as the concept of consent to Ezra was the unity with which you were to approach any and all potential arrangements.   
“There must be no part of this endeavor in which we are not together,” his voice was calm and even, filled with soft affection as he rubbed your fingers between his palms. His eyes enveloped you, drawing your own gaze into deep and hypnotic pools. “I will do nothing, my gaze will not linger on another without you beside me. I will ask the same of you. Nothing is to transpire without each of our individual presences within one another’s orbit.”  
You both further discussed your terms over the course of the next several days. Ezra wanted your absolute certainty; the faintest doubt in your mind must be immediately and honestly expressed the moment it arose. You discussed your limits, safe words. Your frank conversation often left you both inflamed, tearing at clothing and gasping into each other’s hungry mouths as he impaled you on his cock, whispering a continuance of your plans that left you groaning and grunting like a desperate animal against any surface he’d seen fit to take you against.   
You had initially brought up the idea of another couple; Ezra had immediately vetoed. He explained that the dynamics would be too touchy, perhaps volatile. Involving another couple may lend complications to what could be construed as an already precarious adventure.   
“Not for the first time, Dove. Men in love, even in lust often house a primal directive to possess and claim. I will not place you or any other in such a position, at least for our first time.”  
It did not matter to Ezra whether your first partner was male, female or elsewhere on the gender continuum; he relayed he’d had pleasurable encounters with all persuasions. He left it up to you.  
After some careful consideration you’d settled on engaging with a female for your first time. You loved Ezra more than the moon and stars, but there was something about the curves and soft, pillowy flesh of a willing and open woman that brought heat to your chest and caused a buzzing in your brain that left your blood rushing in your ears and your mouth dry.  
He’d flashed his Cheshire smile at your declaration and enveloped you in a crushing embrace, whispering devotionals against the crook of your neck.

******

The girl you’d found was tall, nearly Ezra’s height. She wore a sequined dress that glittered like a garnet against the light of the soft Edison bulbs on your end tables. Her laugh was musical, it reminded you of wind chimes made of hollow bone. She laughed often; this was what had drawn you to her.  
She’d been leaning back on the bar of the club you’d spent weeks visiting. It was a small, intimate location festooned with antique rococo furniture draped in tapestries of purple and scarlet. You’d taken your time, easing into the sophisticated atmosphere, acquainting yourselves with staff and regular patrons. The rhythm of the location was languid, sensuous. You could almost picture nude, rubenesque concubines reclining against the velvet couches while old-world Jazz plucked tinkling notes in the incensed air. It was perfect, and the intimate setting was ripe for measuring the potential of the various patrons who walked through its doors.  
So, it was the joyous, full-bodied laughter that had drawn you to her. Ezra let you take the lead, staying back to watch you. You ingratiated yourself to her easily, offering her a drink that she gladly accepted. As you both made your way to the ornate couch upon which Ezra perched, you noted him watching intently, lids hooded, finger idly stroking the lip of the glass in his hand. His eyes were tide pools, drawing you to him, hypnotizing.  
Predatory.  
And so the girl, named Andra, sat betwixt you as you began your dance. You flirted shamelessly, throwing your head back, leaning forward to give her a glimpse of what was underneath. You noticed her gaze linger there, and felt your adrenaline spike. You took a chance and brushed the knuckles of one hand against the side of her knee as you reached for your drink. The knee moved to press against yours.  
Ezra was much quieter than usual, allowing you to steer the conversation. He’d chime in occasionally, but for the most part his gaze lingered on your animated face. His eyes smoldered, his arm extended down the length of the back of the couch.  
At one point you stood, excusing yourself to the restroom. Andra excused herself as well. You entered the unisex fresher and before you had time to react Andra had you pressed against a stall door, her hands in your hair, her tongue curling into your startled gasp. You froze only momentarily before returning her kiss, framing her own soft face with your hands.  
Your lips tangled for endless moments before you came back to yourself, forcing a break as you reluctantly pulled away. You both panted in silence, chests rising and falling in rapid succession, before Andra spoke.  
“I like you.” her smile was small, shy. The brazenness had melted away with interruption of affection.  
You huffed out a laugh.  
“I like you too,” you paused, considering. “Do you like him as well?”  
Her soft chuckle was an echo of yours.  
“He’s very handsome.”  
“I agree.” You grasped her hand in yours, meeting her gaze. Your eyes became serious, your words measured like sordid currency.  
“Would you like to come home with us, Andra?”  
She would be delighted to, she replied. She really never did things like this, she said. She kept mostly to herself, but she had just received word that she had been approved for a loan to open a private art gallery. She felt like celebrating.  
“She feels like celebrating, Ezra,” you quipped when you returned. He immediately stood, nodded once, paid the tab. He pulled you aside briefly before you left to walk home.  
“Sweet girl, I cannot help but notice your lips are swollen, almost as if from some form of vigorous contact…” he whispered, his expression unreadable.  
You shrugged. “She kissed me in the bathroom. It took me by surprise.”  
His gaze darkened, lips set in a grim line. Your heart jumped into your throat.  
“Always together, remember? Rule one.”  
You found it difficult to meet his eyes when they burned into you like hot ash.  
“I’m...sorry, Ezra. It won’t happen again. I lost myself.”  
“It’s okay to lose yourself, Dovie, just don’t jeopardize the trust we’ve agreed upon so ardently.” his hand grasped your chin, tilting your face to his as his lips ghosted over yours.  
“I love you so fucking much.”

******

“Look what you’re doing to our lovely conquest, Dove,” Ezra cooed, his chest slicked with sweat, one hand slowly pumping up and down his engorged cock. He knelt behind you, fingers in your quivering cunt as you lapped at Andra spread out and eager while your mouth worked her. You flattened your tongue and alternated long, slow licks with wrapping your lips around her hard little bud. Andra was keening, sobbing, canting her hips up toward you as you desperately worked to take in the flood of slick that poured out of her.  
You thrust your hips back forcefully as you came up for air. Your mouth and chin was drenched in her come, it was intoxicating and made you feel feral. You were working toward your third orgasm of the night, having already come twice just from the friction of your grinding clit on the surface of the blanket beneath you. Ezra leaned forward to capture your mouth, moaning at the taste of your eager lover.  
“See how she falls apart so easily for you, legs quivering uncontrollably? She’s soaking the sheets beneath her. She cannot begin to keep those gorgeous noises from spilling, much like the slick from her twitching hole..”  
You cried out, lost in the feeling of being tugged so deliciously both forward and backward between warring sensations.   
You felt the blunt head of Ezra’s cock at your trembling entrance, and you pushed back one again, desperate for him to fill you as the head of his cock nudged against your clit, then notched at your tight, soaked entrance.  
You groaned loudly into the weeping slit before you as he sheathed himself inside of you and when his hips finally made contact with the backs of your legs, you bucked against him.  
“Fuck, Ezra,” you sobbed. “So fucking good oh my fucking gods….”  
He remained still as you fucked yourself back onto his turgid length once, twice, three times and then the wire pulled tight within you was snapped again, your arms trembling violently before you collapsed forward, gasping and screaming into the soaked blankets beneath you. Andra scrambled up the mattress and shuffled back to where you were connected. You felt her hands on your hitching ass as you spasmed uncontrollably around Ezra’s hard, slick cock.  
Ezra was moaning as he went deeper, grinding his hips up and down against your spasming cunt as your come flooded out around where he speared into you.  
“Ooooooooh yes, oh yes beautiful girl, let it out for me, soak this fucking cock, you feel so fucking good, you get so fucking tight when you come on my dick like this..”  
As you came down from your high, your hips dropped and you lay almost motionless except for the aftershocks that coursed through you.  
You heard Ezra moan again and turned with dazed interest to glance over your shoulder, where you observed Andra taking Ezra’s cock down her throat. She bobbed on it, taking down an impressive amount of his length as her hand massaged his balls.   
Ezra’s expression was one of concentration, his eyes squeezed shut, mouth hanging open as he gasped as he was drawn, again and again, into her mouth.  
You watched the scene in front of you, and it occurred to you that there was a complete stranger giving Ezra pleasure, that it was someone other than you. You felt confused. Why did it feel like this so suddenly, when only moments before you’d enthusiastically had your entire mouth on her clit, your tongue inside of her?  
It didn’t bother you then, so why now?  
The longer you lay there, the more discomfort you felt. You didn’t like it. Wordlessly, you extricated yourself from the bed and silently donned your silk robe. You stood at the foot of the bed and observed what was happening before you, your skin growing tighter and tighter the longer you stared.  
What is wrong with me? This is okay, it was what you’d agreed upon.  
The longer you tried to deny it, the stronger the waves of deep, red tumult built and crashed around your foggy mind.  
“....Dove?” a hesitant question, unsure. Ezra had stilled, almost frozen on the bed. His eyes were dilated, blown black, but there was a very specific brand of concern etching his features. Andra watched you warily, as if suddenly aware that she’d waded into some unspoken, uncertain territory. You watched her begin to back off the bed slowly, as if distancing herself from an apex predator.  
You felt storms building; you struggled to steady your breath, chest heaving. You felt control slip from your tenuous grasp.  
You felt rage.  
Ezra had talked about the dark force of possession, of needing to own and claim among men in such arrangements as this.  
You realized this applied to women just as well.  
Ezra was yours, this woman had him in her mouth, your cock was inside of her, this strange woman you’d just met who dared to give him pleasure while you were RIGHT. THERE.  
Your mind was blank, your perception of movement coming to you like frames in an old slide projector.  
Click.  
You stood at the foot of the bed, arms crossed and expression blank.  
Click.  
You vaguely saw Ezra move from the bed and grab his pants. He was confused, eerily silent.  
Click.  
You had just a moment to process the sudden look of shock and panic that crossed Andra’s face as your hands wrapped around her neck.  
There was shouting, Andra’s face was red, turning purple, her hands scrabbling desperately to break the vice-like grip of your fingers pressing into her throat, her eyes bulging. Her heartbeat was a fluttering bird beneath you, a pitiful animal caught in a snare.  
Larger hands were grabbing at you, the shouting continued. You could not make out the words, so hypnotized were you by the sight of panicked, waning consciousness before you.  
You were flung backward, your hands pried roughly off of yielding flesh, your grip faltering.  
Your back hit the wall. Ezra was staring at you with wide eyes. He looked terrified.  
Andra was just to the left of numb terror, gasping and sobbing the breath back into her burning lungs.  
You looked down at your hands, clenched and shaking. Your whole body shaking.  
You were a monster.  
You turned, stumbling desperately through the doorway and into the hall.  
You pulled the robe tight around you and rushed out, out of everything, attempting to leave yourself behind.  
Running.


	15. Chapter 15

_ Waxing Gibbous  _

_ Pairing: Ezra + femNurse! Reader _

_ Rating: Hard M / 18+ ONLY _

_ * Warnings: Angst, Comfort, Serious conversations, NC-17 levels of soft fluffy sappy Self-Indulgence I will not apologize. _

_ * Summary: You run, but you cannot hide. _

_ * Word Count: ~2k _

  
  
  


PART FIFTEEN

  
  


You were thinking again of the pillar of salt.

******

Did Lot’s wife have a name?

You tried to remember. Your mind was fixating on the tale you remembered through the smudged glass of your mind of the Old Testament in the patriarchal religion you were taught in your youth. A fable set in Sodom, two angels visited Lot and his wife and bore horrified witness to the sin and debauchery inherent in what must have been a normal night for Sodomites. The angels had instructed Lot and his wife to flee, to run from the city the next day. To not look behind them.

So they ran out of the city as… God and the angels rained holy terror down upon their neighbors?

You couldn’t quite remember, the time you’d spent off of your home world made the details unfocused like a blurry holo-screen. 

_ You were so, so tired. _

Lot and Wife ran, but Wife couldn’t help herself- she had to turn and look one last time. Her weakness, her deficit of character had turned her into a pillar of salt.

Did she miss it? You think she looked because she may have had some regret. Perhaps it was a look out of defiance, meant to thumb her nose a final time at the imposed authority of celestial beings who knew better than her, better than all of them. 

You envied that pillar of salt.

After the incident you were blank, hauling clothing onto trembling limbs that would never forget the feeling of the frantic, stuttering pulse beneath your fingers. The column of sweat-slickened throat that housed tendons creaking under your onslaught. 

You ran.

You had vaguely realized that Ezra’s hands had been reaching out, grasping at you desperately. His voice came from under water, pleading, begging. The singular thought in your head, the metronome that ticked like a bomb toward detonation, screamed at you over and over. It refused to let go, refused to stop.

You had to  _ leave _ .

It had become increasingly evident to Ezra that you were determined, and so he had stood aside. You watched his hands clench and release, a telltale indication of his stress. You could not look at his face. If you had you’d have seen the visage of a man in the process of being eviscerated by the ghosts of every mistake and bad decision he’d ever made. You had your wallet and your key card and nothing else.

And you left.

You’d walked briskly down the length of two city blocks before hailing a hoverpod.

“Where to, citizen?” The disembodied voice of the embedded Navi-Host infused the metallic confines of the pod with a perfunctory formality that you found perversely comforting. No emotion, no flesh. Computerized hospitality, a coldly engineered means to an end.

_ Where to, citizen? _

“Take me to Grand Central Plaza,” you’d replied. It was honestly the first place that had popped into your addled mind. It was a hotel, despite its name of humble proportions and mid-range in price. You needed space away to mourn yourself. You remembered a time when you were simply unsure….it felt like several lifetimes ago, in a surgical clinic on a parallel timeline. Perhaps in other iterations you were still there, never having known of Ezra’s existence. If by chance you had met him back then, you would have been scared of him. The same way you would have been scared of who you were now.

You’d been a nurse. You still were, you supposed. You were, on some level, still capable of healing. But you’d become so, so  _ comfortable _ with destroying. Hurting. Letting dark shades of red bring rage into your mind like a stumble off the edge of a cliff you never saw coming. 

You stayed in that room for two weeks. You did not leave. You had food and clothing delivered to your room, you left credit information at the front desk of the hotel with instructions to charge whatever would be necessary. You did not know how long you would stay there in that room, but you knew you could not be around anyone. You began to contemplate leaving Central altogether. You weren’t sure you were ready to be around any kind of humanity, including Ezra.

When you thought of him you felt a cavernous ache in your tired heart. How could you love someone like you did, willing to  _ die _ and  _ kill _ for them, and then walk away? What part of your fundamental makeup programmed you to be okay with any of this?

It was fear, you knew, miserably complicit in your own failure. You thought at this point that perhaps you  _ wouldn’t _ leave. You’d simply sit in this dull room in a place that was not your home and will yourself to fade away. 

******

It was after those initial two weeks of mournful solitude that Ezra found you. Much like that first time on the Green, he found you numb. There was no blood spatter this time, but the wounds your soul sustained were plain on your face, like a badge of bottomless sorrow that darkened the cast of your eyes and hardened the set of your mouth.

When you heard the knock on your door, hesitant, you knew it was him. You were expecting….dread? Sorrow? Indifference? Instead your heart kicked up like an engine turning over, hitting against your chest like a snare drum. You dimly realized your hands were shaking as you opened the door.

There he stood. Ghostly. He had dark circles under his eyes, his shoulders slumped forward. His hair chaotically askew, it would have been comical if not for the sorrow and  _ guilt  _ that hammered its way home within you. His eyes, so somber, as if the light within had dimmed to the flicker of a candle precariously close to snuffing itself out. You fisted your hand into the front of his sweater and drew him in. His answering smile was wan, sorrowful. He shuffled forward on unsure feet.

“You look like shit, Dovie.”

“You don’t look so hot yourself, Ez.”

He looked unsure. The cocksure confidence of the suave salesman, of the roguish poet, was gone. He looked both ancient and startlingly childlike. His eyes raised to yours, he held you there, beseeching.

“May I parlay with you, lover?” his voice was soft, rough, like well-used leather. 

You sat on the edge of your bed, patting the surface of the mattress beside you. Ezra sat. He did not touch you. 

“I do not blame you for leaving. Far from it. I made a mistake. I believe we both did.”

You felt the sting of fresh, hot tears gather in the corners of your swollen eyes. You could not fathom that your body still contained enough moisture to cry. 

“Ezra,” you choked out pathetically. “Ezra, I put my hands on that girl…. _ I didn’t even know I was doing it… _ .it was as if I were watching myself from outside of my body.”

Ezra  _ did _ reach out then, placing a hand gingerly on your knee.

“We have been foolish truly, Dove, to believe that the nefarious moon has fully loosed us from its amorphous talons...our souls do indeed continue to tread betwixt the doorway of the righteous and the darkness of entropy.”

You felt the tears well further until they spilled over the curve of lids, tracking down the swell of your cheeks.

“The girl….is...is she okay? Did I hurt her? Did she need medical attention?”

A deep sigh, followed by a slow stroke of his thumb across the patchy scruff at his jaw.

“That girl….she’ll be alright, Dove. Took a fair bit of convincing and a sizable donation to her gallery, but in the end she graciously agreed not to press charges.”

“I just feel so... _ low, _ Ezra. I never thought I’d be like this. I was always supposed to help people...I never wanted riches or luxury, I just wanted to be a good person. Instead I have more credits than I can ever spend, and I’m this unhinged  _ monster.” _

__ Ezra grasped your chin. You knew you looked an absolute mess. Your eyes almost puffed shut, your face swollen. You did not cry in a romantic way- it was messy, and snotty, and loud, and you were sniffing because you couldn’t breathe out of your nose. Ezra still took you in as if you were a rough-cut gem in a field of ragweed- unpolished, wild, precious to anyone who truly knew what they held in their hand.

“No monster, my Dove,  _ never  _ that. Merely a traumatized girl who never learned to care for herself the way she cares for everyone else. The devils that plague us seek to ruin everything we’ve done in this long and wretched life. You must know, lover, that with every fiber of my heavenly makeup I will walk through fire, I will die endless agonized deaths on countless green, fetid moons if I get to spend one moment in your orbit.”

As he spoke, he drew you toward him. He wound his arms around you, pulling you into his chest. Resting your head against him, you felt like a child. Exhaustion made your own limbs heavy. You felt his heart, steady and strong. 

_ “I’ve been thinking about the pillar of salt. That’s what I wanted to be. I wanted to disappear,” _ you whispered. You were unsure if Ezra even heard you at first, but then he spoke.

“The Bible story? Old Testament? As I recall the wife of Lot had no name…” he ruminated, the rumble of his voice an engine of reprieve that wrapped its fingers into your tangled mind.

“No name,” you echoed to him, slurring your words into the fabric of his sweater.  _ “S’was her fault. In the Bible it’s always the woman. She looked back and the angels punished her for it. Lot got away because he listened. Eve didn’t listen either…” _

__ “I believe that other sacred texts mention the tale. The woman  _ did _ have a name, in some Jewish traditions they called her Edith. But it’s not always the women who are the downfall of humanitie’s many judgements and morality plays. I think of the myths of Greece which came well before, it was Euridyce that was chased into the underworld, the domain of Hades. Her husband Orpheus was so moved by grief that he played his lyre until the dead took notice. He was thus allowed to retrieve his bride, providing the caveat that he refrain from looking back as they departed.

“Euridyce was true to her word. It was Orpheus, the man, who could not bear to risk his love not following in actuality. It was Orpheus who did not trust the word of the god of the Dead, and so he looked back, and his beloved was dragged from him once again.”

Sensing your quickly fading consciousness, he tipped you gently backward until you rested upon his chest against the width of the mattress. You hummed softly and inhaled him into your senses, letting him fill you. You allowed him to knit you together again.

_ “My flawed, glorious, beautiful girl. The day you doubt my unhinged devotion is the day I am willingly reclaimed by whatever terrain is beneath me,” _ he murmured as you clung to the last threads of your consciousness.  _ “My heart is yours cradle or break as you see fit. My soul will always seek out yours. I am bound to you inextricably. My love, my true North. There is nothing you could ever do in this life or the next to lose me.” _

You felt the final drift of lips across your hairline, barely there, warm breath that drew you back into his heart.


End file.
